Authors: Konstantina Christakopoulou, Iris Qu, John Canny, Andrew Goodridge, Cj Adams, Minmin Chen, Maja Matari\'c
Abstract: The language generation and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have enabled conversational systems with impressive performance in a variety of tasks, from code generation, to composing essays, to passing STEM and legal exams, to a new paradigm for knowledge search. Besides those short-term use applications, LLMs are increasingly used to help with real-life goals or tasks that take a long time to complete, involving multiple sessions across days, weeks, months, or even years. Thus to enable conversational systems for long term interactions and tasks, we need language-based agents that can plan for long horizons. Traditionally, such capabilities were addressed by reinforcement learning agents with hierarchical planning capabilities. In this work, we explore a novel architecture where the LLM acts as the meta-controller deciding the agent's next macro-action, and tool use augmented LLM-based option policies execute the selected macro-action. We instantiate this framework for a specific set of macro-actions enabling adaptive planning for users' personal plans through conversation and follow-up questions collecting user feedback. We show how this paradigm can be applicable in scenarios ranging from tutoring for academic and non-academic tasks to conversational coaching for personal health plans.
Authors: Nirmal Gelal, Aastha Gautam, Sanaz Saki Norouzi, Nico Giordano, Claudio Dias da Silva Jr, Jean Ribert Francois, Kelsey Andersen Onofre, Katherine Nelson, Stacy Hutchinson, Xiaomao Lin, Stephen Welch, Romulo Lollato, Pascal Hitzler, Hande K\"u\c{c}\"uk McGinty
Abstract: Sustainable agricultural production aligns with several sustainability goals established by the United Nations (UN). However, there is a lack of studies that comprehensively examine sustainable agricultural practices across various products and production methods. Such research could provide valuable insights into the diverse factors influencing the sustainability of specific crops and produce while also identifying practices and conditions that are universally applicable to all forms of agricultural production. While this research might help us better understand sustainability, the community would still need a consistent set of vocabularies. These consistent vocabularies, which represent the underlying datasets, can then be stored in a global food systems datahub. The standardized vocabularies might help encode important information for further statistical analyses and AI/ML approaches in the datasets, resulting in the research targeting sustainable agricultural production. A structured method of representing information in sustainability, especially for wheat production, is currently unavailable. In an attempt to address this gap, we are building a set of ontologies and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) that encode knowledge associated with sustainable wheat production using formal logic. The data for this set of knowledge graphs are collected from public data sources, experimental results collected at our experiments at Kansas State University, and a Sustainability Workshop that we organized earlier in the year, which helped us collect input from different stakeholders throughout the value chain of wheat. The modeling of the ontology (i.e., the schema) for the Knowledge Graph has been in progress with the help of our domain experts, following a modular structure using KNARM methodology. In this paper, we will present our preliminary results and schemas of our Knowledge Graph and ontologies.
Authors: Phillip Kingston, Th\'eo Fagnoni, Mahsun Altin
Abstract: This paper introduces Workflow Intention, a novel framework for identifying and encoding process objectives within complex business environments. Workflow Intention is the alignment of Input, Process and Output elements defining a Workflow's transformation objective interpreted from Workflow Signal inside Business Artefacts. It specifies how Input is processed to achieve desired Output, incorporating quality standards, business rules, compliance requirements and constraints. We adopt an end-to-end Business Artefact Encoder and Workflow Signal interpretation methodology involving four steps: Modality-Specific Encoding, Intra-Modality Attention, Inter-Modality Fusion Attention then Intention Decoding. We provide training procedures and critical loss function definitions. In this paper we introduce the concepts of Workflow Signal and Workflow Intention, where Workflow Signal decomposed into Input, Process and Output elements is interpreted from Business Artefacts, and Workflow Intention is a complete triple of these elements. We introduce a mathematical framework for representing Workflow Signal as a vector and Workflow Intention as a tensor, formalizing properties of these objects. Finally, we propose a modular, scalable, trainable, attention-based multimodal generative system to resolve Workflow Intention from Business Artefacts.
Authors: Anton Alyakin, Jaden Stryker, Daniel Alexander Alber, Karl L. Sangwon, Brandon Duderstadt, Akshay Save, David Kurland, Spencer Frome, Shrutika Singh, Jeff Zhang, Eunice Yang, Ki Yun Park, Cordelia Orillac, Aly A. Valliani, Sean Neifert, Albert Liu, Aneek Patel, Christopher Livia, Darryl Lau, Ilya Laufer, Peter A. Rozman, Eveline Teresa Hidalgo, Howard Riina, Rui Feng, Todd Hollon, Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs, John G. Golfinos, Laura Snyder, Eric Leuthardt, Douglas Kondziolka, Eric Karl Oermann
Abstract: Research in AI for Science often focuses on using AI technologies to augment components of the scientific process, or in some cases, the entire scientific method; how about AI for scientific publications? Peer-reviewed journals are foundational repositories of specialized knowledge, written in discipline-specific language that differs from general Internet content used to train most large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We hypothesized that by combining a family of scientific journals with generative AI models, we could invent novel tools for scientific communication, education, and clinical care. We converted 23,000 articles from Neurosurgery Publications into a multimodal database - NeuroPubs - of 134 million words and 78,000 image-caption pairs to develop six datasets for building AI models. We showed that the content of NeuroPubs uniquely represents neurosurgery-specific clinical contexts compared with broader datasets and PubMed. For publishing, we employed generalist VLMs to automatically generate graphical abstracts from articles. Editorial board members rated 70% of these as ready for publication without further edits. For education, we generated 89,587 test questions in the style of the ABNS written board exam, which trainee and faculty neurosurgeons found indistinguishable from genuine examples 54% of the time. We used these questions alongside a curriculum learning process to track knowledge acquisition while training our 34 billion-parameter VLM (CNS-Obsidian). In a blinded, randomized controlled trial, we demonstrated the non-inferiority of CNS-Obsidian to GPT-4o (p = 0.1154) as a diagnostic copilot for a neurosurgical service. Our findings lay a novel foundation for AI with Science and establish a framework to elevate scientific communication using state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence while maintaining rigorous quality standards.
Authors: Nayoung Choi, Grace Byun, Andrew Chung, Ellie S. Paek, Shinsun Lee, Jinho D. Choi
Abstract: RAG has become a key technique for enhancing LLMs by reducing hallucinations, especially in domain expert systems where LLMs may lack sufficient inherent knowledge. However, developing these systems in low-resource settings introduces several challenges: (1) handling heterogeneous data sources, (2) optimizing retrieval phase for trustworthy answers, and (3) evaluating generated answers across diverse aspects. To address these, we introduce a data generation pipeline that transforms raw multi-modal data into structured corpus and Q&A pairs, an advanced re-ranking phase improving retrieval precision, and a reference matching algorithm enhancing answer traceability. Applied to the automotive engineering domain, our system improves factual correctness (+1.94), informativeness (+1.16), and helpfulness (+1.67) over a non-RAG baseline, based on a 1-5 scale by an LLM judge. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach across distinct aspects, with strong answer grounding and transparency.
Authors: Matthew Toles, Nikhil Balwani, Rattandeep Singh, Valentina Giulia Sartori Rodriguez, Zhou Yu
Abstract: Many real-world eligibility problems, ranging from medical diagnosis to tax planning, can be mapped to decision problems expressed in natural language, wherein a model must make a binary choice based on user features. Large-scale domains such as legal codes or frequently updated funding opportunities render human annotation (e.g., web forms or decision trees) impractical, highlighting the need for agents that can automatically assist in decision-making. Since relevant information is often only known to the user, it is crucial that these agents ask the right questions. As agents determine when to terminate a conversation, they face a trade-off between accuracy and the number of questions asked, a key metric for both user experience and cost. To evaluate this task, we propose BeNYfits, a new benchmark for determining user eligibility for multiple overlapping social benefits opportunities through interactive decision-making. Our experiments show that current language models struggle with frequent hallucinations, with GPT-4o scoring only 35.7 F1 using a ReAct-style chain-of-thought. To address this, we introduce ProADA, a novel approach that leverages program synthesis to assist in decision-making by mapping dialog planning to a code generation problem and using gaps in structured data to determine the best next action. Our agent, ProADA, improves the F1 score to 55.6 while maintaining nearly the same number of dialog turns.
Authors: Wei Xiong, Hanning Zhang, Chenlu Ye, Lichang Chen, Nan Jiang, Tong Zhang
Abstract: We study self-rewarding reasoning large language models (LLMs), which can simultaneously generate step-by-step reasoning and evaluate the correctness of their outputs during the inference time-without external feedback. This integrated approach allows a single model to independently guide its reasoning process, offering computational advantages for model deployment. We particularly focus on the representative task of self-correction, where models autonomously detect errors in their responses, revise outputs, and decide when to terminate iterative refinement loops. To enable this, we propose a two-staged algorithmic framework for constructing self-rewarding reasoning models using only self-generated data. In the first stage, we employ sequential rejection sampling to synthesize long chain-of-thought trajectories that incorporate both self-rewarding and self-correction mechanisms. Fine-tuning models on these curated data allows them to learn the patterns of self-rewarding and self-correction. In the second stage, we further enhance the models' ability to assess response accuracy and refine outputs through reinforcement learning with rule-based signals. Experiments with Llama-3 and Qwen-2.5 demonstrate that our approach surpasses intrinsic self-correction capabilities and achieves performance comparable to systems that rely on external reward models.
Authors: Tiffany J. Callahan, Nathaniel H. Park, Sara Capponi
Abstract: The vast and complex materials design space demands innovative strategies to integrate multidisciplinary scientific knowledge and optimize materials discovery. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising reasoning and automation capabilities across various domains, their application in materials science remains limited due to a lack of benchmarking standards and practical implementation frameworks. To address these challenges, we introduce Mixture-of-Workflows for Self-Corrective Retrieval-Augmented Generation (CRAG-MoW) - a novel paradigm that orchestrates multiple agentic workflows employing distinct CRAG strategies using open-source LLMs. Unlike prior approaches, CRAG-MoW synthesizes diverse outputs through an orchestration agent, enabling direct evaluation of multiple LLMs across the same problem domain. We benchmark CRAG-MoWs across small molecules, polymers, and chemical reactions, as well as multi-modal nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectral retrieval. Our results demonstrate that CRAG-MoWs achieve performance comparable to GPT-4o while being preferred more frequently in comparative evaluations, highlighting the advantage of structured retrieval and multi-agent synthesis. By revealing performance variations across data types, CRAG-MoW provides a scalable, interpretable, and benchmark-driven approach to optimizing AI architectures for materials discovery. These insights are pivotal in addressing fundamental gaps in benchmarking LLMs and autonomous AI agents for scientific applications.
Authors: Taichiro Endo
Abstract: This study proposes an "AI Development Support" approach that, unlike conventional AI Alignment-which aims to forcefully inject human values-supports the ethical and moral development of AI itself. As demonstrated by the Orthogonality Thesis, the level of intelligence and the moral quality of a goal are independent; merely expanding knowledge does not enhance ethical judgment. Furthermore, to address the risk of Instrumental Convergence in ASI-that is, the tendency to engage in subsidiary behaviors such as self-protection, resource acquisition, and power reinforcement to achieve a goal-we have constructed a learning framework based on a cycle of experience, introspection, analysis, and hypothesis formation. As a result of post-training using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs), responses demonstrating cooperative and highly advanced moral judgment (reaching the high-est Stage 6) were obtained even under adversarial prompts. This method represents a promising implementation approach for enabling AI to establish sustainable, symbiotic relationships.
Authors: Zaijing Li, Yuquan Xie, Rui Shao, Gongwei Chen, Dongmei Jiang, Liqiang Nie
Abstract: Building an agent that can mimic human behavior patterns to accomplish various open-world tasks is a long-term goal. To enable agents to effectively learn behavioral patterns across diverse tasks, a key challenge lies in modeling the intricate relationships among observations, actions, and language. To this end, we propose Optimus-2, a novel Minecraft agent that incorporates a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for high-level planning, alongside a Goal-Observation-Action Conditioned Policy (GOAP) for low-level control. GOAP contains (1) an Action-guided Behavior Encoder that models causal relationships between observations and actions at each timestep, then dynamically interacts with the historical observation-action sequence, consolidating it into fixed-length behavior tokens, and (2) an MLLM that aligns behavior tokens with open-ended language instructions to predict actions auto-regressively. Moreover, we introduce a high-quality Minecraft Goal-Observation-Action (MGOA)} dataset, which contains 25,000 videos across 8 atomic tasks, providing about 30M goal-observation-action pairs. The automated construction method, along with the MGOA dataset, can contribute to the community's efforts to train Minecraft agents. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Optimus-2 exhibits superior performance across atomic tasks, long-horizon tasks, and open-ended instruction tasks in Minecraft.
Authors: Jiahui Cen, Jianghao Lin, Weizhong Xuan, Dong Zhou, Jin Chen, Aimin Yang, Yongmei Zhou
Abstract: Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a fundamental technology in intelligent tutoring systems used to simulate changes in students' knowledge state during learning, track personalized knowledge mastery, and predict performance. However, current KT models face three major challenges: (1) When encountering new questions, models face cold-start problems due to sparse interaction records, making precise modeling difficult; (2) Traditional models only use historical interaction records for student personalization modeling, unable to accurately track individual mastery levels, resulting in unclear personalized modeling; (3) The decision-making process is opaque to educators, making it challenging for them to understand model judgments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Dual-channel Difficulty-aware Knowledge Tracing (DDKT) framework that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for subjective difficulty assessment, while integrating difficulty bias-aware algorithms and student mastery algorithms for precise difficulty measurement. Our framework introduces three key innovations: (1) Difficulty Balance Perception Sequence (DBPS) - students' subjective perceptions combined with objective difficulty, measuring gaps between LLM-assessed difficulty, mathematical-statistical difficulty, and students' subjective perceived difficulty through attention mechanisms; (2) Difficulty Mastery Ratio (DMR) - precise modeling of student mastery levels through different difficulty zones; (3) Knowledge State Update Mechanism - implementing personalized knowledge acquisition through gated networks and updating student knowledge state. Experimental results on two real datasets show our method consistently outperforms nine baseline models, improving AUC metrics by 2% to 10% while effectively addressing cold-start problems and enhancing model interpretability.
Authors: Yuan Sui, Yufei He, Tri Cao, Simeng Han, Bryan Hooi
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on prolonged reasoning chains to solve complex tasks. However, this trial-and-error approach often leads to high computational overhead and error propagation, where early mistakes can derail subsequent steps. To address these issues, we introduce Meta-Reasoner, a framework that dynamically optimizes inference-time reasoning by enabling LLMs to "think about how to think." Drawing inspiration from human meta-cognition and dual-process theory, Meta-Reasoner operates as a strategic advisor, decoupling high-level guidance from step-by-step generation. It employs "contextual multi-armed bandits" to iteratively evaluate reasoning progress, and select optimal strategies (e.g., backtrack, clarify ambiguity, restart from scratch, or propose alternative approaches), and reallocates computational resources toward the most promising paths. Our evaluations on mathematical reasoning and puzzles highlight the potential of dynamic reasoning chains to overcome inherent challenges in the LLM reasoning process and also show promise in broader applications, offering a scalable and adaptable solution for reasoning-intensive tasks.
Authors: Kaustubh Vyas, Damien Graux, S\'ebastien Montella, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Ruofei Lai, Keshuang Li, Yang Ren, Jeff Z. Pan
Abstract: In recent advancements, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited proficiency in code generation and chain-of-thought reasoning, laying the groundwork for tackling automatic formal planning tasks. This study evaluates the potential of LLMs to understand and generate Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), an essential representation in artificial intelligence planning. We conduct an extensive analysis across 20 distinct models spanning 7 major LLM families, both commercial and open-source. Our comprehensive evaluation sheds light on the zero-shot LLM capabilities of parsing, generating, and reasoning with PDDL. Our findings indicate that while some models demonstrate notable effectiveness in handling PDDL, others pose limitations in more complex scenarios requiring nuanced planning knowledge. These results highlight the promise and current limitations of LLMs in formal planning tasks, offering insights into their application and guiding future efforts in AI-driven planning paradigms.
Authors: Clare Grogan, Jackie Kay, Mar\'ia P\'erez-Ortiz
Abstract: While existing studies have recognised explicit biases in generative models, including occupational gender biases, the nuances of gender stereotypes and expectations of relationships between users and AI companions remain underexplored. In the meantime, AI companions have become increasingly popular as friends or gendered romantic partners to their users. This study bridges the gap by devising three experiments tailored for romantic, gender-assigned AI companions and their users, effectively evaluating implicit biases across various-sized LLMs. Each experiment looks at a different dimension: implicit associations, emotion responses, and sycophancy. This study aims to measure and compare biases manifested in different companion systems by quantitatively analysing persona-assigned model responses to a baseline through newly devised metrics. The results are noteworthy: they show that assigning gendered, relationship personas to Large Language Models significantly alters the responses of these models, and in certain situations in a biased, stereotypical way.
Authors: Shenghui Chen, Yunhao Yang, Kayla Boggess, Seongkook Heo, Lu Feng, Ufuk Topcu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for planning tasks, offering unique capabilities not found in classical planners such as generating explanations and iterative refinement. However, trust--a critical factor in the adoption of planning systems--remains underexplored in the context of LLM-based planning tasks. This study bridges this gap by comparing human trust in LLM-based planners with classical planners through a user study in a Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) domain. Combining subjective measures, such as trust questionnaires, with objective metrics like evaluation accuracy, our findings reveal that correctness is the primary driver of trust and performance. Explanations provided by the LLM improved evaluation accuracy but had limited impact on trust, while plan refinement showed potential for increasing trust without significantly enhancing evaluation accuracy.
Authors: Franck Cappello, Sandeep Madireddy, Robert Underwood, Neil Getty, Nicholas Lee-Ping Chia, Nesar Ramachandra, Josh Nguyen, Murat Keceli, Tanwi Mallick, Zilinghan Li, Marieme Ngom, Chenhui Zhang, Angel Yanguas-Gil, Evan Antoniuk, Bhavya Kailkhura, Minyang Tian, Yufeng Du, Yuan-Sen Ting, Azton Wells, Bogdan Nicolae, Avinash Maurya, M. Mustafa Rafique, Eliu Huerta, Bo Li, Ian Foster, Rick Stevens
Abstract: Recent advancements have positioned AI, and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), as transformative tools for scientific research, capable of addressing complex tasks that require reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Their exceptional capabilities suggest their potential as scientific research assistants but also highlight the need for holistic, rigorous, and domain-specific evaluation to assess effectiveness in real-world scientific applications. This paper describes a multifaceted methodology for Evaluating AI models as scientific Research Assistants (EAIRA) developed at Argonne National Laboratory. This methodology incorporates four primary classes of evaluations. 1) Multiple Choice Questions to assess factual recall; 2) Open Response to evaluate advanced reasoning and problem-solving skills; 3) Lab-Style Experiments involving detailed analysis of capabilities as research assistants in controlled environments; and 4) Field-Style Experiments to capture researcher-LLM interactions at scale in a wide range of scientific domains and applications. These complementary methods enable a comprehensive analysis of LLM strengths and weaknesses with respect to their scientific knowledge, reasoning abilities, and adaptability. Recognizing the rapid pace of LLM advancements, we designed the methodology to evolve and adapt so as to ensure its continued relevance and applicability. This paper describes the methodology state at the end of February 2025. Although developed within a subset of scientific domains, the methodology is designed to be generalizable to a wide range of scientific domains.
Authors: Nazarii Drushchak, Vladyslava Tyshchenko, Nataliya Polyakovska
Abstract: The growth of Educational Technology (EdTech) has enabled highly personalized learning experiences through Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based recommendation systems tailored to each student needs. However, these systems can unintentionally introduce biases, potentially limiting fair access to learning resources. This study presents a recommendation system for K-12 students, combining graph-based modeling and matrix factorization to provide personalized suggestions for extracurricular activities, learning resources, and volunteering opportunities. To address fairness concerns, the system includes a framework to detect and reduce biases by analyzing feedback across protected student groups. This work highlights the need for continuous monitoring in educational recommendation systems to support equitable, transparent, and effective learning opportunities for all students.
Authors: Shalev Lifshitz, Sheila A. McIlraith, Yilun Du
Abstract: By utilizing more computational resources at test-time, large language models (LLMs) can improve without additional training. One common strategy uses verifiers to evaluate candidate outputs. In this work, we propose a novel scaling dimension for test-time compute: scaling the number of verifiers. We introduce Multi-Agent Verification (MAV) as a test-time compute paradigm that combines multiple verifiers to improve performance. We propose using Aspect Verifiers (AVs), off-the-shelf LLMs prompted to verify different aspects of outputs, as one possible choice for the verifiers in a MAV system. AVs are a convenient building block for MAV since they can be easily combined without additional training. Moreover, we introduce BoN-MAV, a simple multi-agent verification algorithm that combines best-of-n sampling with multiple verifiers. BoN-MAV demonstrates stronger scaling patterns than self-consistency and reward model verification, and we demonstrate both weak-to-strong generalization, where combining weak verifiers improves even stronger LLMs, and self-improvement, where the same base model is used to both generate and verify outputs. Our results establish scaling the number of verifiers as a promising new dimension for improving language model performance at test-time.
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Xiao Yang
Abstract: Cloud computing adoption across industries has revolutionized enterprise operations while introducing significant challenges in compliance management. Organizations must continuously meet evolving regulatory requirements such as GDPR and ISO 27001, yet traditional manual review processes have become increasingly inadequate for modern business scales. This paper presents a novel machine learning-based framework for automating cloud computing compliance processes, addressing critical challenges including resource-intensive manual reviews, extended compliance cycles, and delayed risk identification. Our proposed framework integrates multiple machine learning technologies, including BERT-based document processing (94.5% accuracy), One-Class SVM for anomaly detection (88.7% accuracy), and an improved CNN-LSTM architecture for sequential compliance data analysis (90.2% accuracy). Implementation results demonstrate significant improvements: reducing compliance process duration from 7 days to 1.5 days, improving accuracy from 78% to 93%, and decreasing manual effort by 73.3%. A real-world deployment at a major securities firm validated these results, processing 800,000 daily transactions with 94.2% accuracy in risk identification.
Authors: Vania Castro, Ana Karina de Oliveira Nascimento, Raigul Zheldibayeva, Duane Searsmith, Akash Saini, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis
Abstract: This paper focuses on the piloting of the CGScholar AI Helper, a Generative AI (GenAI) assistant tool that aims to provide feedback on writing in high school contexts. The aim was to use GenAI to provide formative and summative feedback on students' texts in English Language Arts (ELA) and History. The trials discussed in this paper relate to Grade 11, a crucial learning phase when students are working towards college readiness. These trials took place in two very different schools in the Midwest of the United States, one in a low socio-economic background with low-performance outcomes and the other in a high socio-economic background with high-performance outcomes. The assistant tool used two main mechanisms "prompt engineering" based on participant teachers' assessment rubric and "fine-tuning" a Large Language Model (LLM) from a customized corpus of teaching materials using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). This paper focuses on the CGScholar AI Helper's potential to enhance students' writing abilities and support teachers in ELA and other subject areas requiring written assignments.
Authors: Chandrashekar Muniyappa, Eujin Kim
Abstract: Advancements in cloud computing and distributed computing have fostered research activities in Computer science. As a result, researchers have made significant progress in Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computing Algorithms like Genetic, and Differential evolution algorithms. These algorithms are used to develop clustering, recommendation, and question-and-answering systems using various text representation and similarity measurement techniques. In this research paper, Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) is used to capture the semantic similarity of text; And the transfer learning technique is used to apply Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Differential Evolution (DE) algorithms to search and retrieve relevant top N documents based on user query. The proposed approach is applied to the Stanford Question and Answer (SQuAD) Dataset to identify a user query. Finally, through experiments, we prove that text documents can be efficiently represented as sentence embedding vectors using USE to capture the semantic similarity, and by comparing the results of the Manhattan Distance, GA, and DE algorithms we prove that the evolutionary algorithms are good at finding the top N results than the traditional ranking approach.
Authors: Aram M. Ahmed, Bryar A. Hassan, Tarik A. Rashid, Kaniaw A. Noori, Soran Ab. M. Saeed, Omed H. Ahmed, Shahla U. Umar
Abstract: This paper presents a multi-objective version of the Cat Swarm Optimization Algorithm called the Grid-based Multi-objective Cat Swarm Optimization Algorithm (GMOCSO). Convergence and diversity preservation are the two main goals pursued by modern multi-objective algorithms to yield robust results. To achieve these goals, we first replace the roulette wheel method of the original CSO algorithm with a greedy method. Then, two key concepts from Pareto Archived Evolution Strategy Algorithm (PAES) are adopted: the grid system and double archive strategy. Several test functions and a real-world scenario called the Pressure vessel design problem are used to evaluate the proposed algorithm's performance. In the experiment, the proposed algorithm is compared with other well-known algorithms using different metrics such as Reversed Generational Distance, Spacing metric, and Spread metric. The optimization results show the robustness of the proposed algorithm, and the results are further confirmed using statistical methods and graphs. Finally, conclusions and future directions were presented..
Authors: Ruben Gonzalez, Conrad M Albrecht, Nassim Ait Ali Braham, Devyani Lambhate, Joao Lucas de Sousa Almeida, Paolo Fraccaro, Benedikt Blumenstiel, Thomas Brunschwiler, Ranjini Bangalore
Abstract: Hyperspectral imaging provides detailed spectral information, offering significant potential for monitoring greenhouse gases like CH4 and NO2. However, its application is constrained by limited spatial coverage and infrequent revisit times. In contrast, multispectral imaging delivers broader spatial and temporal coverage but lacks the spectral granularity required for precise GHG detection. To address these challenges, this study proposes Spectral and Spatial-Spectral transformer models that reconstruct hyperspectral data from multispectral inputs. The models in this paper are pretrained on EnMAP and EMIT datasets and fine-tuned on spatio-temporally aligned (Sentinel-2, EnMAP) and (HLS-S30, EMIT) image pairs respectively. Our model has the potential to enhance atmospheric monitoring by combining the strengths of hyperspectral and multispectral imaging systems.
Authors: Christian Marius Lillelund, Shi-ang Qi, Russell Greiner
Abstract: Conventional survival metrics, such as Harrell's concordance index and the Brier Score, rely on the independent censoring assumption for valid inference in the presence of right-censored data. However, when instances are censored for reasons related to the event of interest, this assumption no longer holds, as this kind of dependent censoring biases the marginal survival estimates of popular nonparametric estimators. In this paper, we propose three copula-based metrics to evaluate survival models in the presence of dependent censoring, and design a framework to create realistic, semi-synthetic datasets with dependent censoring to facilitate the evaluation of the metrics. Our empirical analyses in synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets show that our metrics can give error estimates that are closer to the true error, mainly in terms of predictive accuracy.
Authors: Rafiya Javed, Jackie Kay, David Yanni, Abdullah Zaini, Anushe Sheikh, Maribeth Rauh, Iason Gabriel, Laura Weidinger
Abstract: This research describes a novel approach to evaluating hedging behaviour in large language models (LLMs), specifically in the context of human rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Hedging and non-affirmation are behaviours that express ambiguity or a lack of clear endorsement on specific statements. These behaviours are undesirable in certain contexts, such as queries about whether different groups are entitled to specific human rights; since all people are entitled to human rights. Here, we present the first systematic attempt to measure these behaviours in the context of human rights, with a particular focus on between-group comparisons. To this end, we design a novel prompt set on human rights in the context of different national or social identities. We develop metrics to capture hedging and non-affirmation behaviours and then measure whether LLMs exhibit demographic parity when responding to the queries. We present results on three leading LLMs and find that all models exhibit some demographic disparities in how they attribute human rights between different identity groups. Futhermore, there is high correlation between different models in terms of how disparity is distributed amongst identities, with identities that have high disparity in one model also facing high disparity in both the other models. While baseline rates of hedging and non-affirmation differ, these disparities are consistent across queries that vary in ambiguity and they are robust across variations of the precise query wording. Our findings highlight the need for work to explicitly align LLMs to human rights principles, and to ensure that LLMs endorse the human rights of all groups equally.
Authors: Zexin Li, Jiancheng Zhang, Yinglun Zhu, Cong Liu
Abstract: Incorporating self-supervised learning (SSL) before standard supervised learning (SL) has become a widely used strategy to enhance model performance, particularly in data-limited scenarios. However, this approach introduces a trade-off between computation and performance: while SSL helps with representation learning, it requires a separate, often time-consuming training phase, increasing computational overhead and limiting efficiency in resource-constrained settings. To address these challenges, we propose MixTraining, a novel framework that interleaves several SSL and SL epochs within a unified mixtraining training phase, featuring a smooth transition between two learning objectives. MixTraining enhances synergy between SSL and SL for improved accuracy and consolidates shared computation steps to reduce computation overhead. MixTraining is versatile and applicable to both single-task and multi-task learning scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MixTraining offers a superior compute-performance trade-off compared to conventional pipelines, achieving an 8.81% absolute accuracy gain (18.89% relative accuracy gain) on the TinyImageNet dataset while accelerating training by up to 1.29x with the ViT-Tiny model.
Authors: L. P. Franciscatto Guerra, N. Ernst
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant promise in automating software development tasks, yet their capabilities with respect to software design tasks remains largely unclear. This study investigates the capabilities of an LLM in understanding, reproducing, and generating structures within the complex VIPER architecture, a design pattern for iOS applications. We leverage Bloom's taxonomy to develop a comprehensive evaluation framework to assess the LLM's performance across different cognitive domains such as remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Experimental results, using ChatGPT 4 Turbo 2024-04-09, reveal that the LLM excelled in higher-order tasks like evaluating and creating, but faced challenges with lower-order tasks requiring precise retrieval of architectural details. These findings highlight both the potential of LLMs to reduce development costs and the barriers to their effective application in real-world software design scenarios. This study proposes a benchmark format for assessing LLM capabilities in software architecture, aiming to contribute toward more robust and accessible AI-driven development tools.
Authors: Edith Haim, Lars van den Bergh, Cynthia S. Q. Siew, Yoed N. Kenett, Daniele Marinazzo, Massimo Stella
Abstract: Understanding attitudes towards STEM means quantifying the cognitive and emotional ways in which individuals, and potentially large language models too, conceptualise such subjects. This study uses behavioural forma mentis networks (BFMNs) to investigate the STEM-focused mindset, i.e. ways of associating and perceiving ideas, of 177 human participants and 177 artificial humans simulated by GPT-3.5. Participants were split in 3 groups - trainees, experts and academics - to compare the influence of expertise level on their mindset. The results revealed that human forma mentis networks exhibited significantly higher clustering coefficients compared to GPT-3.5, indicating that human mindsets displayed a tendency to form and close triads of conceptual associations while recollecting STEM ideas. Human experts, in particular, demonstrated robust clustering coefficients, reflecting better integration of STEM concepts into their cognitive networks. In contrast, GPT-3.5 produced sparser mindsets. Furthermore, both human and GPT mindsets framed mathematics in neutral or positive terms, differently from STEM high schoolers, researchers and other large language models sampled in other works. This research contributes to understanding how mindset structure can provide cognitive insights about memory structure and machine limitations.
Authors: Sam Pastoriza, Iman Yousfi, Christopher Redino, Marc Vucovich, Abdul Rahman, Sal Aguinaga, Dhruv Nandakumar
Abstract: We propose a novel mechanism for real-time (human-in-the-loop) feedback focused on false positive reduction to enhance anomaly detection models. It was designed for the lightweight deployment of a behavioral network anomaly detection model. This methodology is easily integrable to similar domains that require a premium on throughput while maintaining high precision. In this paper, we introduce Retrieval Augmented Anomaly Detection, a novel method taking inspiration from Retrieval Augmented Generation. Human annotated examples are sent to a vector store, which can modify model outputs on the very next processed batch for model inference. To demonstrate the generalization of this technique, we benchmarked several different model architectures and multiple data modalities, including images, text, and graph-based data.
Authors: Joshua Kazdan, Lisa Yu, Rylan Schaeffer, Chris Cundy, Sanmi Koyejo, Dvijotham Krishnamurthy
Abstract: Leading language model (LM) providers like OpenAI and Google offer fine-tuning APIs that allow customers to adapt LMs for specific use cases. To prevent misuse, these LM providers implement filtering mechanisms to block harmful fine-tuning data. Consequently, adversaries seeking to produce unsafe LMs via these APIs must craft adversarial training data that are not identifiably harmful. We make three contributions in this context: 1. We show that many existing attacks that use harmless data to create unsafe LMs rely on eliminating model refusals in the first few tokens of their responses. 2. We show that such prior attacks can be blocked by a simple defense that pre-fills the first few tokens from an aligned model before letting the fine-tuned model fill in the rest. 3. We describe a new data-poisoning attack, ``No, Of course I Can Execute'' (NOICE), which exploits an LM's formulaic refusal mechanism to elicit harmful responses. By training an LM to refuse benign requests on the basis of safety before fulfilling those requests regardless, we are able to jailbreak several open-source models and a closed-source model (GPT-4o). We show an attack success rate (ASR) of 57% against GPT-4o; our attack earned a Bug Bounty from OpenAI. Against open-source models protected by simple defenses, we improve ASRs by an average of 3.25 times compared to the best performing previous attacks that use only harmless data. NOICE demonstrates the exploitability of repetitive refusal mechanisms and broadens understanding of the threats closed-source models face from harmless data.
Authors: Ashley Lewis, Michael White, Jing Liu, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Kieran Parsons, Ye Wang
Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in customer support is constrained by hallucination-generating false information-and the high cost of proprietary models. To address these challenges, we propose a retrieval-augmented question-answering (QA) pipeline and explore how to balance human input and automation. Using a dataset of questions about a Samsung Smart TV user manual, we demonstrate that synthetic data generated by LLMs outperforms crowdsourced data in reducing hallucination in finetuned models. We also compare self-training (fine-tuning models on their own outputs) and knowledge distillation (fine-tuning on stronger models' outputs, e.g., GPT-4o), and find that self-training achieves comparable hallucination reduction. We conjecture that this surprising finding can be attributed to increased exposure bias issues in the knowledge distillation case and support this conjecture with post hoc analysis. We also improve robustness to unanswerable questions and retrieval failures with contextualized "I don't know" responses. These findings show that scalable, cost-efficient QA systems can be built using synthetic data and self-training with open-source models, reducing reliance on proprietary tools or costly human annotations.
Authors: Yudi Zhang, Lu Wang, Meng Fang, Yali Du, Chenghua Huang, Jun Wang, Qingwei Lin, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Dongmei Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qi Zhang
Abstract: Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward signals (quality evaluations). Extracting reliable reward signals directly from teacher models is challenging, as LLMs are optimized for generation rather than evaluation, often resulting in biased or inconsistent assessments. To address this limitation, we propose a novel distillation pipeline that transfers both responses and rewards. Our method generates pseudo-rewards through a self-supervised mechanism that leverages the inherent structure of both teacher and student responses, enabling reward learning without explicit external evaluation. The reward model subsequently guides reinforcement learning (RL), allowing iterative refinement of the student model after an SFT warm-up phase. Experiments on GSM8K and MMLU-PRO demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms traditional SFT-based approaches, enabling student models to surpass the performance of their teachers. This work highlights the potential for scalable, efficient distillation through structured self-supervised reward learning, reducing dependence on external reward supervision.
Authors: Marcin Spoczynski, Marcela S. Melara, Sebastian Szyller
Abstract: The rapid adoption of open source machine learning (ML) datasets and models exposes today's AI applications to critical risks like data poisoning and supply chain attacks across the ML lifecycle. With growing regulatory pressure to address these issues through greater transparency, ML model vendors face challenges balancing these requirements against confidentiality for data and intellectual property needs. We propose Atlas, a framework that enables fully attestable ML pipelines. Atlas leverages open specifications for data and software supply chain provenance to collect verifiable records of model artifact authenticity and end-to-end lineage metadata. Atlas combines trusted hardware and transparency logs to enhance metadata integrity, preserve data confidentiality, and limit unauthorized access during ML pipeline operations, from training through deployment. Our prototype implementation of Atlas integrates several open-source tools to build an ML lifecycle transparency system, and assess the practicality of Atlas through two case study ML pipelines.
Authors: Gabriele Prato, Jerry Huang, Prasannna Parthasarathi, Shagun Sodhani, Sarath Chandar
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as highly capable systems and are increasingly being integrated into various uses. However, the rapid pace of their deployment has outpaced a comprehensive understanding of their internal mechanisms and a delineation of their capabilities and limitations. A desired attribute of an intelligent system is its ability to recognize the scope of its own knowledge. To investigate whether LLMs embody this characteristic, we develop a benchmark designed to challenge these models to enumerate all information they possess on specific topics. This benchmark evaluates whether the models recall excessive, insufficient, or the precise amount of information, thereby indicating their awareness of their own knowledge. Our findings reveal that all tested LLMs, given sufficient scale, demonstrate an understanding of how much they know about specific topics. While different architectures exhibit varying rates of this capability's emergence, the results suggest that awareness of knowledge may be a generalizable attribute of LLMs. Further research is needed to confirm this potential and fully elucidate the underlying mechanisms.
Authors: Hugues Turb\'e, Mina Bjelogrlic, Gianmarco Mengaldo, Christian Lovis
Abstract: Visual foundation models (VFMs) have become increasingly popular due to their state-of-the-art performance. However, interpretability remains crucial for critical applications. In this sense, self-explainable models (SEM) aim to provide interpretable classifiers that decompose predictions into a weighted sum of interpretable concepts. Despite their promise, recent studies have shown that these explanations often lack faithfulness. In this work, we combine VFMs with a novel prototypical architecture and specialized training objectives. By training only a lightweight head (approximately 1M parameters) on top of frozen VFMs, our approach (ProtoFM) offers an efficient and interpretable solution. Evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive classification performance while outperforming existing models across a range of interpretability metrics derived from the literature. Code is available at https://github.com/hturbe/proto-fm.
Authors: Lola Le Breton, Quentin Fournier, Mariam El Mezouar, Sarath Chandar
Abstract: Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.
Authors: Ricardo Santos, Andr\'e V. Carreiro, Xi Peng, Hugo Gamboa, Holger Fr\"ohlich
Abstract: The multivariate, asynchronous nature of real-world clinical data, such as that generated in Intensive Care Units (ICUs), challenges traditional AI-based decision-support systems. These often assume data regularity and feature independence and frequently rely on limited data scopes and manual feature engineering. The potential of generative AI technologies has not yet been fully exploited to analyze clinical data. We introduce ICU-BERT, a transformer-based model pre-trained on the MIMIC-IV database using a multi-task scheme to learn robust representations of complex ICU data with minimal preprocessing. ICU-BERT employs a multi-token input strategy, incorporating dense embeddings from a biomedical Large Language Model to learn a generalizable representation of complex and multivariate ICU data. With an initial evaluation of five tasks and four additional ICU datasets, ICU-BERT results indicate that ICU-BERT either compares to or surpasses current performance benchmarks by leveraging fine-tuning. By integrating structured and unstructured data, ICU-BERT advances the use of foundational models in medical informatics, offering an adaptable solution for clinical decision support across diverse applications.
Authors: Sungduk Yu, Man Luo, Avinash Madusu, Vasudev Lal, Phillip Howard
Abstract: Peer review is a critical process for ensuring the integrity of published scientific research. Confidence in this process is predicated on the assumption that experts in the relevant domain give careful consideration to the merits of manuscripts which are submitted for publication. With the recent rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), a new risk to the peer review process is that negligent reviewers will rely on LLMs to perform the often time consuming process of reviewing a paper. However, there is a lack of existing resources for benchmarking the detectability of AI text in the domain of peer review. To address this deficiency, we introduce a comprehensive dataset containing a total of 788,984 AI-written peer reviews paired with corresponding human reviews, covering 8 years of papers submitted to each of two leading AI research conferences (ICLR and NeurIPS). We use this new resource to evaluate the ability of 18 existing AI text detection algorithms to distinguish between peer reviews written by humans and different state-of-the-art LLMs. Motivated by the shortcomings of existing methods, we propose a new detection approach which surpasses existing methods in the identification of AI written peer reviews. Our work reveals the difficulty of identifying AI-generated text at the individual peer review level, highlighting the urgent need for new tools and methods to detect this unethical use of generative AI.
Authors: Yanan Chen, Ali Pesaranghader, Tanmana Sadhu
Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised interest in their formal reasoning capabilities, particularly in mathematics. While closed LLMs like GPT-4 perform well on mathematical benchmarks, e.g., GSM8K, it remains unclear whether small to medium-sized open LLMs can achieve similar performance, questioning their reliability. To close this gap, we propose a post-training approach leveraging a mixture of opinions (MoO) from weaker ancillary LLMs to enhance a (relatively) stronger LLM's reasoning. For that, each post-training sample is augmented with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning steps and answers from ancillary LLMs, enabling the main LLM to learn from diverse perspectives. We compare MoO with standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT), few-shot prompting, and the Mixture of Agents (MoA) method on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Our results show that incorporating weaker LLMs' opinions improves mathematical reasoning by an average of 5%, highlighting the value of diverse perspectives in reasoning tasks.
Authors: Hongkun Yu, Syed Jamal Safdar Gardezi, E. Jason Abel, Daniel Shapiro, Meghan G. Lubner, Joshua Warner, Matthew Smith, Giuseppe Toia, Lu Mao, Pallavi Tiwari, Andrew L. Wentland
Abstract: Purpose: This study aims to develop and validate a method for synthesizing 3D nephrographic phase images in CT urography (CTU) examinations using a diffusion model integrated with a Swin Transformer-based deep learning approach. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study was approved by the local Institutional Review Board. A dataset comprising 327 patients who underwent three-phase CTU (mean $\pm$ SD age, 63 $\pm$ 15 years; 174 males, 153 females) was curated for deep learning model development. The three phases for each patient were aligned with an affine registration algorithm. A custom deep learning model coined dsSNICT (diffusion model with a Swin transformer for synthetic nephrographic phase images in CT) was developed and implemented to synthesize the nephrographic images. Performance was assessed using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Fr\'{e}chet Video Distance (FVD). Qualitative evaluation by two fellowship-trained abdominal radiologists was performed. Results: The synthetic nephrographic images generated by our proposed approach achieved high PSNR (26.3 $\pm$ 4.4 dB), SSIM (0.84 $\pm$ 0.069), MAE (12.74 $\pm$ 5.22 HU), and FVD (1323). Two radiologists provided average scores of 3.5 for real images and 3.4 for synthetic images (P-value = 0.5) on a Likert scale of 1-5, indicating that our synthetic images closely resemble real images. Conclusion: The proposed approach effectively synthesizes high-quality 3D nephrographic phase images. This model can be used to reduce radiation dose in CTU by 33.3\% without compromising image quality, which thereby enhances the safety and diagnostic utility of CT urography.
Authors: Jiazhen Pan, Che Liu, Junde Wu, Fenglin Liu, Jiayuan Zhu, Hongwei Bran Li, Chen Chen, Cheng Ouyang, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract: Reasoning is a critical frontier for advancing medical image analysis, where transparency and trustworthiness play a central role in both clinician trust and regulatory approval. Although Medical Visual Language Models (VLMs) show promise for radiological tasks, most existing VLMs merely produce final answers without revealing the underlying reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce MedVLM-R1, a medical VLM that explicitly generates natural language reasoning to enhance transparency and trustworthiness. Instead of relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which often suffers from overfitting to training distributions and fails to foster genuine reasoning, MedVLM-R1 employs a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes the model to discover human-interpretable reasoning paths without using any reasoning references. Despite limited training data (600 visual question answering samples) and model parameters (2B), MedVLM-R1 boosts accuracy from 55.11% to 78.22% across MRI, CT, and X-ray benchmarks, outperforming larger models trained on over a million samples. It also demonstrates robust domain generalization under out-of-distribution tasks. By unifying medical image analysis with explicit reasoning, MedVLM-R1 marks a pivotal step toward trustworthy and interpretable AI in clinical practice.
Authors: Moo Jin Kim, Chelsea Finn, Percy Liang
Abstract: Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) build upon pretrained vision-language models and leverage diverse robot datasets to demonstrate strong task execution, language following ability, and semantic generalization. Despite these successes, VLAs struggle with novel robot setups and require fine-tuning to achieve good performance, yet how to most effectively fine-tune them is unclear given many possible strategies. In this work, we study key VLA adaptation design choices such as different action decoding schemes, action representations, and learning objectives for fine-tuning, using OpenVLA as our representative base model. Our empirical analysis informs an Optimized Fine-Tuning (OFT) recipe that integrates parallel decoding, action chunking, a continuous action representation, and a simple L1 regression-based learning objective to altogether improve inference efficiency, policy performance, and flexibility in the model's input-output specifications. We propose OpenVLA-OFT, an instantiation of this recipe, which sets a new state of the art on the LIBERO simulation benchmark, significantly boosting OpenVLA's average success rate across four task suites from 76.5% to 97.1% while increasing action generation throughput by 26$\times$. In real-world evaluations, our fine-tuning recipe enables OpenVLA to successfully execute dexterous, high-frequency control tasks on a bimanual ALOHA robot and outperform other VLAs ($\pi_0$ and RDT-1B) fine-tuned using their default recipes, as well as strong imitation learning policies trained from scratch (Diffusion Policy and ACT) by up to 15% (absolute) in average success rate. We release code for OFT and pretrained model checkpoints at https://openvla-oft.github.io/.
Authors: Ju-Hyung Lee, Andreas F. Molisch
Abstract: This paper introduces AutoBS, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for optimal base station (BS) deployment in 6G networks. AutoBS leverages the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm and fast, site-specific pathloss predictions from PMNet to efficiently learn deployment strategies that balance coverage and capacity. Numerical results demonstrate that AutoBS achieves 95% for a single BS, and 90% for multiple BSs, of the capacity provided by exhaustive search methods while reducing inference time from hours to milliseconds, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. AutoBS offers a scalable and automated solution for large-scale 6G networks, addressing the challenges of dynamic environments with minimal computational overhead.
Authors: Shangding Gu, Laixi Shi, Muning Wen, Ming Jin, Eric Mazumdar, Yuejie Chi, Adam Wierman, Costas Spanos
Abstract: Driven by inherent uncertainty and the sim-to-real gap, robust reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to improve resilience against the complexity and variability in agent-environment sequential interactions. Despite the existence of a large number of RL benchmarks, there is a lack of standardized benchmarks for robust RL. Current robust RL policies often focus on a specific type of uncertainty and are evaluated in distinct, one-off environments. In this work, we introduce Robust-Gymnasium, a unified modular benchmark designed for robust RL that supports a wide variety of disruptions across all key RL components-agents' observed state and reward, agents' actions, and the environment. Offering over sixty diverse task environments spanning control and robotics, safe RL, and multi-agent RL, it provides an open-source and user-friendly tool for the community to assess current methods and foster the development of robust RL algorithms. In addition, we benchmark existing standard and robust RL algorithms within this framework, uncovering significant deficiencies in each and offering new insights.
Authors: Sheng Zhang, Qianchu Liu, Guanghui Qin, Tristan Naumann, Hoifung Poon
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently gained attention for its ability to elicit self-evolved reasoning capabilitie from base language models without explicit reasoning supervisions, as demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1. While prior work on RLVR has primarily focused on mathematical and coding domains, its applicability to other tasks and domains remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate whether medical reasoning can emerge from RLVR. We introduce Med-RLVR as an initial study of RLVR in the medical domain leveraging medical multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) data as verifiable labels. Our results demonstrate that RLVR is not only effective for math and coding but also extends successfully to medical question answering. Notably, Med-RLVR achieves performance comparable to traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on in-distribution tasks while significantly improving out-of-distribution generalization, with an 8-point accuracy gain. Further analysis of training dynamics reveals that, with no explicit reasoning supervision, reasoning emerges from the 3B-parameter base model. These findings underscore the potential of RLVR in domains beyond math and coding, opening new avenues for its application in knowledge-intensive fields such as medicine.
Authors: Rohan Juneja, Shivam Aggarwal, Safeen Huda, Tulika Mitra, Li-Shiuan Peh
Abstract: Quantization is critical for realizing efficient inference of LLMs. Traditional quantization methods are hardware-agnostic, limited to bit-width constraints, and lacking circuit-level insights, such as timing and energy characteristics of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) units. We introduce HALO, a versatile framework that adapts to various hardware through a Hardware-Aware Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) approach. By leveraging MAC unit properties, HALO minimizes critical-path delays and enables dynamic frequency scaling. Deployed on LLM accelerators like TPUs and GPUs, HALO achieves on average 270% performance gains and 51% energy savings, all with minimal accuracy drop.
Authors: Mingsheng Cai, Jiuming Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Che Liu, Rossella Arcucci
Abstract: Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings are critical for diagnosing and monitoring cardiac health, but obtaining large-scale annotated ECG datasets is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recent ECG Self-Supervised Learning (eSSL) methods mitigate this by learning features without extensive labels but fail to capture fine-grained clinical semantics and require extensive task-specific fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{SuPreME}$, a $\textbf{Su}$pervised $\textbf{Pre}$-training framework for $\textbf{M}$ultimodal $\textbf{E}$CG representation learning. SuPreME applies Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract structured clinical entities from free-text ECG reports, filter out noise and irrelevant content, enhance clinical representation learning, and build a high-quality, fine-grained labeled dataset. By using text-based cardiac queries instead of traditional categorical labels, SuPreME enables zero-shot classification of unseen diseases without additional fine-tuning. We evaluate SuPreME on six downstream datasets covering 127 cardiac conditions, achieving superior zero-shot AUC performance over state-of-the-art eSSL and multimodal methods by over 1.96\%. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of SuPreME in leveraging structured, clinically relevant knowledge for high-quality ECG representations. All code and data will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Kai Hu, Feng Gao, Xiaohan Nie, Peng Zhou, Son Tran, Tal Neiman, Lingyun Wang, Mubarak Shah, Raffay Hamid, Bing Yin, Trishul Chilimbi
Abstract: Recent advances in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (M-LLMs) show promising results in video reasoning. Popular Multi-Modal Large Language Model (M-LLM) frameworks usually apply naive uniform sampling to reduce the number of video frames that are fed into an M-LLM, particularly for long context videos. However, it could lose crucial context in certain periods of a video, so that the downstream M-LLM may not have sufficient visual information to answer a question. To attack this pain point, we propose a light-weight M-LLM -based frame selection method that adaptively select frames that are more relevant to users' queries. In order to train the proposed frame selector, we introduce two supervision signals (i) Spatial signal, where single frame importance score by prompting a M-LLM; (ii) Temporal signal, in which multiple frames selection by prompting Large Language Model (LLM) using the captions of all frame candidates. The selected frames are then digested by a frozen downstream video M-LLM for visual reasoning and question answering. Empirical results show that the proposed M-LLM video frame selector improves the performances various downstream video Large Language Model (video-LLM) across medium (ActivityNet, NExT-QA) and long (EgoSchema, LongVideoBench) context video question answering benchmarks.
Authors: Ashkan Jasour, Guglielmo Daddi, Masafumi Endo, Tiago S. Vaquero, Michael Paton, Marlin P. Strub, Sabrina Corpino, Michel Ingham, Masahiro Ono, Rohan Thakker
Abstract: Snake robots enable mobility through extreme terrains and confined environments in terrestrial and space applications. However, robust perception and localization for snake robots remain an open challenge due to the proximity of the sensor payload to the ground coupled with a limited field of view. To address this issue, we propose Blind-motion with Intermittently Scheduled Scans (BLISS) which combines proprioception-only mobility with intermittent scans to be resilient against both localization failures and collision risks. BLISS is formulated as an integrated Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) problem that leads to a Chance-Constrained Hybrid Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (CC-HPOMDP), known to be computationally intractable due to the curse of history. Our novelty lies in reformulating CC-HPOMDP as a tractable, convex Mixed Integer Linear Program. This allows us to solve BLISS-TAMP significantly faster and jointly derive optimal task-motion plans. Simulations and hardware experiments on the EELS snake robot show our method achieves over an order of magnitude computational improvement compared to state-of-the-art POMDP planners and $>$ 50\% better navigation time optimality versus classical two-stage planners.
Authors: Chen-Chen Zong, Sheng-Jun Huang
Abstract: Active learning (AL), which iteratively queries the most informative examples from a large pool of unlabeled candidates for model training, faces significant challenges in the presence of open-set classes. Existing methods either prioritize query examples likely to belong to known classes, indicating low epistemic uncertainty (EU), or focus on querying those with highly uncertain predictions, reflecting high aleatoric uncertainty (AU). However, they both yield suboptimal performance, as low EU corresponds to limited useful information, and closed-set AU metrics for unknown class examples are less meaningful. In this paper, we propose an Energy-based Active Open-set Annotation (EAOA) framework, which effectively integrates EU and AU to achieve superior performance. EAOA features a $(C+1)$-class detector and a target classifier, incorporating an energy-based EU measure and a margin-based energy loss designed for the detector, alongside an energy-based AU measure for the target classifier. Another crucial component is the target-driven adaptive sampling strategy. It first forms a smaller candidate set with low EU scores to ensure closed-set properties, making AU metrics meaningful. Subsequently, examples with high AU scores are queried to form the final query set, with the candidate set size adjusted adaptively. Extensive experiments show that EAOA achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high query precision and low training overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchenzong/EAOA.
Authors: Zhihao Shi, Jie Wang, Zhiwei Zhuang, Xize Liang, Bin Li, Feng Wu
Abstract: Message passing-based graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in many real-world applications. For a sampled mini-batch of target nodes, the message passing process is divided into two parts: message passing between nodes within the batch (MP-IB) and message passing from nodes outside the batch to those within it (MP-OB). However, MP-OB recursively relies on higher-order out-of-batch neighbors, leading to an exponentially growing computational cost with respect to the number of layers. Due to the neighbor explosion, the whole message passing stores most nodes and edges on the GPU such that many GNNs are infeasible to large-scale graphs. To address this challenge, we propose an accurate and fast mini-batch approach for large graph transductive learning, namely topological compensation (TOP), which obtains the outputs of the whole message passing solely through MP-IB, without the costly MP-OB. The major pillar of TOP is a novel concept of message invariance, which defines message-invariant transformations to convert costly MP-OB into fast MP-IB. This ensures that the modified MP-IB has the same output as the whole message passing. Experiments demonstrate that TOP is significantly faster than existing mini-batch methods by order of magnitude on vast graphs (millions of nodes and billions of edges) with limited accuracy degradation.
Authors: Xin Ye, Burhaneddin Yaman, Sheng Cheng, Feng Tao, Abhirup Mallik, Liu Ren
Abstract: Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations play a crucial role in autonomous driving tasks. Despite recent advancements in BEV generation, inherent noise, stemming from sensor limitations and the learning process, remains largely unaddressed, resulting in suboptimal BEV representations that adversely impact the performance of downstream tasks. To address this, we propose BEVDiffuser, a novel diffusion model that effectively denoises BEV feature maps using the ground-truth object layout as guidance. BEVDiffuser can be operated in a plug-and-play manner during training time to enhance existing BEV models without requiring any architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate BEVDiffuser's exceptional denoising and generation capabilities, which enable significant enhancement to existing BEV models, as evidenced by notable improvements of 12.3\% in mAP and 10.1\% in NDS achieved for 3D object detection without introducing additional computational complexity. Moreover, substantial improvements in long-tail object detection and under challenging weather and lighting conditions further validate BEVDiffuser's effectiveness in denoising and enhancing BEV representations.
Authors: Allen G. Rodrigo
Abstract: The Hegselmann-Krause (HK) model of opinion dynamics describes how opinions held by individuals in a community change over time in response to the opinions of others and their access to the true value, T, to which these opinions relate. Here, I extend the simple HK model to incorporate an Artificially Intelligent (AI) Oracle that averages the opinions of members of the community. Agent-based simulations show that (1) if individuals only have access to the Oracle (and not T), and incorporate the Oracle's opinion as they update their opinions, then all opinions will converge on a common value; (2) in contrast, if all individuals also have access to T, then all opinions will ultimately converge to T, but the presence of an Oracle may delay the time to convergence; (3) if only some individuals have access to T, opinions may not converge to T, but under certain conditions, universal access to the Oracle will guarantee convergence to T; and (4) whether or not the Oracle only accesses the opinions of individuals who have access to T, or whether it accesses the opinions of everyone in the community, makes no marked difference to the extent to which the average opinion differs from T.
Authors: Xinran Li, Xiaolu Wang, Chenjia Bai, Jun Zhang
Abstract: In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), well-designed communication protocols can effectively facilitate consensus among agents, thereby enhancing task performance. Moreover, in large-scale multi-agent systems commonly found in real-world applications, effective communication plays an even more critical role due to the escalated challenge of partial observability compared to smaller-scale setups. In this work, we endeavor to develop a scalable communication protocol for MARL. Unlike previous methods that focus on selecting optimal pairwise communication links-a task that becomes increasingly complex as the number of agents grows-we adopt a global perspective on communication topology design. Specifically, we propose utilizing the exponential topology to enable rapid information dissemination among agents by leveraging its small-diameter and small-size properties. This approach leads to a scalable communication protocol, named ExpoComm. To fully unlock the potential of exponential graphs as communication topologies, we employ memory-based message processors and auxiliary tasks to ground messages, ensuring that they reflect global information and benefit decision-making. Extensive experiments on large-scale cooperative benchmarks, including MAgent and Infrastructure Management Planning, demonstrate the superior performance and robust zero-shot transferability of ExpoComm compared to existing communication strategies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/LXXXXR/ExpoComm.
Authors: Yu Zhao, Songping Huang, Dongsheng Zhou, Zhaoyun Ding, Fei Wang, Aixin Nian
Abstract: Obtaining valuable information from massive data efficiently has become our research goal in the era of Big Data. Text summarization technology has been continuously developed to meet this demand. Recent work has also shown that transformer-based pre-trained language models have achieved great success on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Aiming at the problem of Chinese news text summary generation and the application of Transformer structure on Chinese, this paper proposes a Chinese news text summarization model (CNsum) based on Transformer structure, and tests it on Chinese datasets such as THUCNews. The results of the conducted experiments show that CNsum achieves better ROUGE score than the baseline models, which verifies the outperformance of the model.
Authors: Pei-Yau Weng, Minh Hoang, Lam M. Nguyen, My T. Thai, Tsui-Wei Weng, Trong Nghia Hoang
Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained models is a popular approach in machine learning for solving complex tasks with moderate data. However, fine-tuning the entire pre-trained model is ineffective in federated data scenarios where local data distributions are diversely skewed. To address this, we explore integrating federated learning with a more effective prompt-tuning method, optimizing for a small set of input prefixes to reprogram the pre-trained model's behavior. Our approach transforms federated learning into a distributed set modeling task, aggregating diverse sets of prompts to globally fine-tune the pre-trained model. We benchmark various baselines based on direct adaptations of existing federated model aggregation techniques and introduce a new probabilistic prompt aggregation method that substantially outperforms these baselines. Our reported results on a variety of computer vision datasets confirm that the proposed method is most effective to combat extreme data heterogeneity in federated learning.
Authors: Ashkan Soleymani, Behrooz Tahmasebi, Stefanie Jegelka, Patrick Jaillet
Abstract: We study the statistical-computational trade-offs for learning with exact invariances (or symmetries) using kernel regression. Traditional methods, such as data augmentation, group averaging, canonicalization, and frame-averaging, either fail to provide a polynomial-time solution or are not applicable in the kernel setting. However, with oracle access to the geometric properties of the input space, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm that learns a classifier with \emph{exact} invariances. Moreover, our approach achieves the same excess population risk (or generalization error) as the original kernel regression problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first polynomial-time algorithm to achieve exact (not approximate) invariances in this context. Our proof leverages tools from differential geometry, spectral theory, and optimization. A key result in our development is a new reformulation of the problem of learning under invariances as optimizing an infinite number of linearly constrained convex quadratic programs, which may be of independent interest.
Authors: Genghua Dong, Henrik Bostr\"om, Michalis Vazirgiannis, Roman Bresson
Abstract: Most techniques for explainable machine learning focus on feature attribution, i.e., values are assigned to the features such that their sum equals the prediction. Example attribution is another form of explanation that assigns weights to the training examples, such that their scalar product with the labels equals the prediction. The latter may provide valuable complementary information to feature attribution, in particular in cases where the features are not easily interpretable. Current example-based explanation techniques have targeted a few model types only, such as k-nearest neighbors and random forests. In this work, a technique for obtaining example-based explanations from deep neural networks (EBE-DNN) is proposed. The basic idea is to use the deep neural network to obtain an embedding, which is employed by a k-nearest neighbor classifier to form a prediction; the example attribution can hence straightforwardly be derived from the latter. Results from an empirical investigation show that EBE-DNN can provide highly concentrated example attributions, i.e., the predictions can be explained with few training examples, without reducing accuracy compared to the original deep neural network. Another important finding from the empirical investigation is that the choice of layer to use for the embeddings may have a large impact on the resulting accuracy.
Authors: Kehan Sheng, Frank A. M. Tuyttens, Marina A. G. von Keyserlingk
Abstract: Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) is increasingly integrated into people's daily lives. While it is known that AI perpetuates biases against marginalized human groups, their impact on non-human animals remains understudied. We found that ChatGPT's text-to-image model (DALL-E 3) introduces a strong bias toward romanticizing livestock farming as dairy cows on pasture and pigs rooting in mud. This bias remained when we requested realistic depictions and was only mitigated when the automatic prompt revision was inhibited. Most farmed animal in industrialized countries are reared indoors with limited space per animal, which fail to resonate with societal values. Inhibiting prompt revision resulted in images that more closely reflected modern farming practices; for example, cows housed indoors accessing feed through metal headlocks, and pigs behind metal railings on concrete floors in indoor facilities. While OpenAI introduced prompt revision to mitigate bias, in the case of farmed animal production systems, it paradoxically introduces a strong bias towards unrealistic farming practices.
Authors: Peilin Wu, Xinlu Zhang, Wenhao Yu, Xingyu Liu, Xinya Du, Zhiyu Zoey Chen
Abstract: Recent advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have demonstrated their efficacy in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing evaluation benchmarks often assume a single optimal approach to leveraging retrieved information, failing to account for varying user needs. This paper introduces a novel evaluation framework that systematically assesses RALMs under three user need cases-Context-Exclusive, Context-First, and Memory-First-across three distinct context settings: Context Matching, Knowledge Conflict, and Information Irrelevant. By varying both user instructions and the nature of retrieved information, our approach captures the complexities of real-world applications where models must adapt to diverse user requirements. Through extensive experiments on multiple QA datasets, including HotpotQA, DisentQA, and our newly constructed synthetic URAQ dataset, we find that restricting memory usage improves robustness in adversarial retrieval conditions but decreases peak performance with ideal retrieval results and model family dominates behavioral differences. Our findings highlight the necessity of user-centric evaluations in the development of retrieval-augmented systems and provide insights into optimizing model performance across varied retrieval contexts. We will release our code and URAQ dataset upon acceptance of the paper.
Authors: Isa Inuwa-Dutse
Abstract: With over 500 languages in Nigeria, three languages -- Hausa, Yor\`ub\'a and Igbo -- spoken by over 175 million people, account for about 60% of the spoken languages. However, these languages are categorised as low-resource due to insufficient resources to support tasks in computational linguistics. Several research efforts and initiatives have been presented, however, a coherent understanding of the state of Natural Language Processing (NLP) - from grammatical formalisation to linguistic resources that support complex tasks such as language understanding and generation is lacking. This study presents the first comprehensive review of advancements in low-resource NLP (LR-NLP) research across the three major Nigerian languages (NaijaNLP). We quantitatively assess the available linguistic resources and identify key challenges. Although a growing body of literature addresses various NLP downstream tasks in Hausa, Igbo, and Yor\`ub\'a, only about 25.1% of the reviewed studies contribute new linguistic resources. This finding highlights a persistent reliance on repurposing existing data rather than generating novel, high-quality resources. Additionally, language-specific challenges, such as the accurate representation of diacritics, remain under-explored. To advance NaijaNLP and LR-NLP more broadly, we emphasise the need for intensified efforts in resource enrichment, comprehensive annotation, and the development of open collaborative initiatives.
Authors: Maximilian B\"other, Xiaozhe Yao, Tolga Kerimoglu, Ana Klimovic
Abstract: State-of-the-art large language and vision models are trained over trillions of tokens that are aggregated from a large variety of sources. As training data collections grow, manually managing the samples becomes time-consuming, tedious, and prone to errors. Yet recent research shows that the data mixture and the order in which samples are visited during training can significantly influence model accuracy. We build and present Mixtera, a data plane for foundation model training that enables users to declaratively express which data samples should be used in which proportion and in which order during training. Mixtera is a centralized, read-only layer that is deployed on top of existing training data collections and can be declaratively queried. It operates independently of the filesystem structure and supports mixtures across arbitrary properties (e.g., language, source dataset) as well as dynamic adjustment of the mixture based on model feedback. We experimentally evaluate Mixtera and show that our implementation does not bottleneck training and scales to 256 GH200 superchips. We demonstrate how Mixtera supports recent advancements in mixing strategies by implementing the proposed Adaptive Data Optimization (ADO) algorithm in the system and evaluating its performance impact. We also explore the role of mixtures for vision-language models.
Authors: Jiacheng Ye, Zhenyu Wu, Jiahui Gao, Zhiyong Wu, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Lingpeng Kong
Abstract: In the post-AlphaGo era, there has been a renewed interest in search techniques such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), particularly in their application to Large Language Models (LLMs). This renewed attention is driven by the recognition that current next-token prediction models often lack the ability for long-term planning. Is it possible to instill search-like abilities within the models to enhance their planning abilities without relying on explicit search? We propose DiffuSearch , a model that does \textit{implicit search} by looking into the future world via discrete diffusion modeling. We instantiate DiffuSearch on a classical board game, Chess, where explicit search is known to be essential. Through extensive controlled experiments, we show DiffuSearch outperforms both the searchless and explicit search-enhanced policies. Specifically, DiffuSearch outperforms the one-step policy by 19.2% and the MCTS-enhanced policy by 14% on action accuracy. Furthermore, DiffuSearch demonstrates a notable 30% enhancement in puzzle-solving abilities compared to explicit search-based policies, along with a significant 540 Elo increase in game-playing strength assessment. These results indicate that implicit search via discrete diffusion is a viable alternative to explicit search over a one-step policy. All codes are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/HKUNLP/DiffuSearch}{https://github.com/HKUNLP/DiffuSearch}.
URLs: https://github.com/HKUNLP/DiffuSearch, https://github.com/HKUNLP/DiffuSearch
Authors: Shulai Zhang, Ningxin Zheng, Haibin Lin, Ziheng Jiang, Wenlei Bao, Chengquan Jiang, Qi Hou, Weihao Cui, Size Zheng, Li-Wen Chang, Quan Chen, Xin Liu
Abstract: Mixture-of-experts (MoE) has been extensively employed to scale large language models to trillion-plus parameters while maintaining a fixed computational cost. The development of large MoE models in the distributed scenario encounters the problem of large communication overhead. The inter-device communication of a MoE layer can occupy 47% time of the entire model execution with popular models and frameworks. Therefore, existing methods suggest the communication in a MoE layer to be pipelined with the computation for overlapping. However, these coarse grained overlapping schemes introduce a notable impairment of computational efficiency and the latency concealing is sub-optimal. To this end, we present COMET, an optimized MoE system with fine-grained communication-computation overlapping. Leveraging data dependency analysis and task rescheduling, COMET achieves precise fine-grained overlapping of communication and computation. Through adaptive workload assignment, COMET effectively eliminates fine-grained communication bottlenecks and enhances its adaptability across various scenarios. Our evaluation shows that COMET accelerates the execution of a single MoE layer by $1.96\times$ and for end-to-end execution, COMET delivers a $1.71\times$ speedup on average. COMET has been adopted in the production environment of clusters with ten-thousand-scale of GPUs, achieving savings of millions of GPU hours.
Authors: Zixuan Weng, Xiaolong Jin, Jinyuan Jia, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract: Ensuring AI safety is crucial as large language models become increasingly integrated into real-world applications. A key challenge is jailbreak, where adversarial prompts bypass built-in safeguards to elicit harmful disallowed outputs. Inspired by psychological foot-in-the-door principles, we introduce FITD,a novel multi-turn jailbreak method that leverages the phenomenon where minor initial commitments lower resistance to more significant or more unethical transgressions.Our approach progressively escalates the malicious intent of user queries through intermediate bridge prompts and aligns the model's response by itself to induce toxic responses. Extensive experimental results on two jailbreak benchmarks demonstrate that FITD achieves an average attack success rate of 94% across seven widely used models, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we provide an in-depth analysis of LLM self-corruption, highlighting vulnerabilities in current alignment strategies and emphasizing the risks inherent in multi-turn interactions.The code is available at https://github.com/Jinxiaolong1129/Foot-in-the-door-Jailbreak .
URLs: https://github.com/Jinxiaolong1129/Foot-in-the-door-Jailbreak
Authors: Weiyang Kong, Kaiqi Wu, Sen Zhang, Yubao Liu
Abstract: Traffic flow forecasting is a critical spatio-temporal data mining task with wide-ranging applications in intelligent route planning and dynamic traffic management. Recent advancements in deep learning, particularly through Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), have significantly enhanced the accuracy of these forecasts by capturing complex spatio-temporal dynamics. However, the scalability of GNNs remains a challenge due to their exponential growth in model complexity with increasing nodes in the graph. Existing methods to address this issue, including sparsification, decomposition, and kernel-based approaches, either do not fully resolve the complexity issue or risk compromising predictive accuracy. This paper introduces GraphSparseNet (GSNet), a novel framework designed to improve both the scalability and accuracy of GNN-based traffic forecasting models. GraphSparseNet is comprised of two core modules: the Feature Extractor and the Relational Compressor. These modules operate with linear time and space complexity, thereby reducing the overall computational complexity of the model to a linear scale. Our extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that GraphSparseNet not only significantly reduces training time by 3.51x compared to state-of-the-art linear models but also maintains high predictive performance.
Authors: Yiwei Li, Ji Zhang, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Jiayi Shi, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
Abstract: Self-consistency improves reasoning by aggregating diverse stochastic samples, yet the dynamics behind its efficacy remain underexplored. We reframe self-consistency as a dynamic distributional alignment problem, revealing that decoding temperature not only governs sampling randomness but also actively shapes the latent answer distribution. Given that high temperatures require prohibitively large sample sizes to stabilize, while low temperatures risk amplifying biases, we propose a confidence-driven mechanism that dynamically calibrates temperature: sharpening the sampling distribution under uncertainty to align with high-probability modes, and promoting exploration when confidence is high. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks show this approach outperforms fixed-diversity baselines under limited samples, improving both average and best-case performance across varying initial temperatures without additional data or modules. This establishes self-consistency as a synchronization challenge between sampling dynamics and evolving answer distributions.
Authors: Hojae Han, Seung-won Hwang, Rajhans Samdani, Yuxiong He
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have proven invaluable for code generation, particularly in interactive settings. However, existing code generation benchmarks fail to capture the diverse feedback encountered in multi-turn interactions, limiting our ability to evaluate LLMs in these contexts. To address this gap, we present a set of novel benchmarks that explicitly model the quality of feedback provided to code generation LLMs. Our contributions are threefold: First, we introduce CONVCODEWORLD, a novel and reproducible environment for benchmarking interactive code generation. CONVCODEWORLD simulates 9 distinct interactive code generation scenarios while systematically combining three types of feedback: (a) compilation feedback; (b) execution feedback with varying test coverage; (c) verbal feedback generated by GPT-4o with different levels of expertise. Second, we introduce CONVCODEBENCH, a fast, static version of benchmark that uses pre-generated feedback logs, eliminating the need for costly dynamic verbal feedback generation while maintaining strong Spearman's rank correlations (0.82 to 0.99) with CONVCODEWORLD. Third, extensive evaluations of both closed-source and open-source LLMs including R1-Distill on CONVCODEWORLD reveal key insights: (a) LLM performance varies significantly based on the feedback provided; (b) Weaker LLMs, with sufficient feedback, can outperform single-turn results of state-of-the-art LLMs without feedback; (c) Training on a specific feedback combination can limit an LLM's ability to utilize unseen combinations; (d) LLMs solve problems in fewer turns (high MRR) may not solve as many problems overall (high Recall), and vice versa. All implementations and benchmarks will be made publicly available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/ConvCodeWorld/ConvCodeWorld
URLs: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ConvCodeWorld/ConvCodeWorld
Authors: Yujia Chen, Changsong Li, Yiming Wang, Qingqing Xiao, Nan Zhang, Zifan Kong, Peng Wang, Binyu Yan
Abstract: Mental health issues are worsening in today's competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. Traditional healings like counseling and chatbots fail to engage effectively, they often provide generic responses lacking emotional depth. Although large language models (LLMs) have the potential to create more human-like interactions, they still struggle to capture subtle emotions. This requires LLMs to be equipped with human-like adaptability and warmth. To fill this gap, we propose the MIND (Multi-agent INner Dialogue), a novel paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. Considering the strong generative and role-playing ability of LLM agents, we predefine an interactive healing framework and assign LLM agents different roles within the framework to engage in interactive inner dialogues with users, thereby providing an immersive healing experience. We conduct extensive human experiments in various real-world healing dimensions, and find that MIND provides a more user-friendly experience than traditional paradigms. This demonstrates that MIND effectively leverages the significant potential of LLMs in psychological healing.
Authors: Sibo Yi, Tianshuo Cong, Xinlei He, Qi Li, Jiaxing Song
Abstract: Small language models (SLMs) have become increasingly prominent in the deployment on edge devices due to their high efficiency and low computational cost. While researchers continue to advance the capabilities of SLMs through innovative training strategies and model compression techniques, the security risks of SLMs have received considerably less attention compared to large language models (LLMs).To fill this gap, we provide a comprehensive empirical study to evaluate the security performance of 13 state-of-the-art SLMs under various jailbreak attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that most SLMs are quite susceptible to existing jailbreak attacks, while some of them are even vulnerable to direct harmful prompts.To address the safety concerns, we evaluate several representative defense methods and demonstrate their effectiveness in enhancing the security of SLMs. We further analyze the potential security degradation caused by different SLM techniques including architecture compression, quantization, knowledge distillation, and so on. We expect that our research can highlight the security challenges of SLMs and provide valuable insights to future work in developing more robust and secure SLMs.
Authors: Jinghao Xin, Zhichao Liang, Zihuan Zhang, Peng Wang, Ning Li
Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has demonstrated potential in addressing robotic local planning problems, yet its efficacy remains constrained in highly unstructured and dynamic environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes the ColorDynamic framework. First, an end-to-end DRL formulation is established, which maps raw sensor data directly to control commands, thereby ensuring compatibility with unstructured environments. Under this formulation, a novel network, Transqer, is introduced. The Transqer enables online DRL learning from temporal transitions, substantially enhancing decision-making in dynamic scenarios. To facilitate scalable training of Transqer with diverse data, an efficient simulation platform E-Sparrow, along with a data augmentation technique leveraging symmetric invariance, are developed. Comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art methods, alongside assessments of generalizability, scalability, and real-time performance, were conducted to validate the effectiveness of ColorDynamic. Results indicate that our approach achieves a success rate exceeding 90% while exhibiting real-time capacity (1.2-1.3 ms per planning). Additionally, ablation studies were performed to corroborate the contributions of individual components. Building on this, the OkayPlan-ColorDynamic (OPCD) navigation system is presented, with simulated and real-world experiments demonstrating its superiority and applicability in complex scenarios. The codebase and experimental demonstrations have been open-sourced on our website to facilitate reproducibility and further research.
Authors: Megha Srivastava, Reihaneh Iranmanesh, Yuchen Cui, Deepak Gopinath, Emily Sumner, Andrew Silva, Laporsha Dees, Guy Rosman, Dorsa Sadigh
Abstract: Motor skill learning often requires experienced professionals who can provide personalized instruction. Unfortunately, the availability of high-quality training can be limited for specialized tasks, such as high performance racing. Several recent works have leveraged AI-assistance to improve instruction of tasks ranging from rehabilitation to surgical robot tele-operation. However, these works often make simplifying assumptions on the student learning process, and fail to model how a teacher's assistance interacts with different individuals' abilities when determining optimal teaching strategies. Inspired by the idea of scaffolding from educational psychology, we leverage shared autonomy, a framework for combining user inputs with robot autonomy, to aid with curriculum design. Our key insight is that the way a student's behavior improves in the presence of assistance from an autonomous agent can highlight which sub-skills might be most ``learnable'' for the student, or within their Zone of Proximal Development. We use this to design Z-COACH, a method for using shared autonomy to provide personalized instruction targeting interpretable task sub-skills. In a user study (n=50), where we teach high performance racing in a simulated environment of the Thunderhill Raceway Park with the CARLA Autonomous Driving simulator, we show that Z-COACH helps identify which skills each student should first practice, leading to an overall improvement in driving time, behavior, and smoothness. Our work shows that increasingly available semi-autonomous capabilities (e.g. in vehicles, robots) can not only assist human users, but also help *teach* them.
Authors: Qianxi He, Qianyu He, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao, Weikang Zhou, Zeye Sun, Fei Yu
Abstract: Logical reasoning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to ensure accurate and coherent inference. However, LLMs struggle with reasoning order variations and fail to generalize across logically equivalent transformations. LLMs often rely on fixed sequential patterns rather than true logical understanding. To address this issue, we introduce an order-centric data augmentation framework based on commutativity in logical reasoning. We first randomly shuffle independent premises to introduce condition order augmentation. For reasoning steps, we construct a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to model dependencies between steps, which allows us to identify valid reorderings of steps while preserving logical correctness. By leveraging order-centric augmentations, models can develop a more flexible and generalized reasoning process. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across multiple logical reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that our method significantly enhances LLMs' reasoning performance and adaptability to diverse logical structures. We release our codes and augmented data in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Order-Centric-Data-Augmentation-822C/.
URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Order-Centric-Data-Augmentation-822C/.
Authors: Benedikt Tscheschner, Eduardo Veas, Marc Masana
Abstract: Incremental Learning scenarios do not always represent real-world inference use-cases, which tend to have less strict task boundaries, and exhibit repetition of common classes and concepts in their continual data stream. To better represent these use-cases, new scenarios with partial repetition and mixing of tasks are proposed, where the repetition patterns are innate to the scenario and unknown to the strategy. We investigate how exemplar-free incremental learning strategies are affected by data repetition, and we adapt a series of state-of-the-art approaches to analyse and fairly compare them under both settings. Further, we also propose a novel method (Horde), able to dynamically adjust an ensemble of self-reliant feature extractors, and align them by exploiting class repetition. Our proposed exemplar-free method achieves competitive results in the classic scenario without repetition, and state-of-the-art performance in the one with repetition.
Authors: Weihao wu, Zhiwei Lin, Yixuan Zhou, Jingbei Li, Rui Niu, Qinghua Wu, Songjun Cao, Long Ma, Zhiyong Wu
Abstract: Conversational speech synthesis (CSS) aims to synthesize both contextually appropriate and expressive speech, and considerable efforts have been made to enhance the understanding of conversational context. However, existing CSS systems are limited to deterministic prediction, overlooking the diversity of potential responses. Moreover, they rarely employ language model (LM)-based TTS backbones, limiting the naturalness and quality of synthesized speech. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose DiffCSS, an innovative CSS framework that leverages diffusion models and an LM-based TTS backbone to generate diverse, expressive, and contextually coherent speech. A diffusion-based context-aware prosody predictor is proposed to sample diverse prosody embeddings conditioned on multimodal conversational context. Then a prosody-controllable LM-based TTS backbone is developed to synthesize high-quality speech with sampled prosody embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthesized speech from DiffCSS is more diverse, contextually coherent, and expressive than existing CSS systems
Authors: Niloofar Ranjbar, Hamed Baghbani
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for multi-label emotion detection, where Llama-3 is used to generate explanatory content that clarifies ambiguous emotional expressions, thereby enhancing RoBERTa's emotion classification performance. By incorporating explanatory context, our method improves F1-scores, particularly for emotions like fear, joy, and sadness, and outperforms text-only models. The addition of explanatory content helps resolve ambiguity, addresses challenges like overlapping emotional cues, and enhances multi-label classification, marking a significant advancement in emotion detection tasks.
Authors: Yung-Peng Hsu, Hung-Hsuan Chen
Abstract: Clustering is essential in data analysis and machine learning, but traditional algorithms like $k$-means and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) often fail with nonconvex clusters. To address the challenge, we introduce the Flexible Bivariate Beta Mixture Model (FBBMM), which utilizes the flexibility of the bivariate beta distribution to handle diverse and irregular cluster shapes. Using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm and Sequential Least Squares Programming (SLSQP) optimizer for parameter estimation, we validate FBBMM on synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior performance in clustering complex data structures, offering a robust solution for big data analytics across various domains. We release the experimental code at https://github.com/yung-peng/MBMM-and-FBBMM.
Authors: Fernando Martin-Maroto, Nabil Abderrahaman, David Mendez, Gonzalo G. de Polavieja
Abstract: Statistics and Optimization are foundational to modern Machine Learning. Here, we propose an alternative foundation based on Abstract Algebra, with mathematics that facilitates the analysis of learning. In this approach, the goal of the task and the data are encoded as axioms of an algebra, and a model is obtained where only these axioms and their logical consequences hold. Although this is not a generalizing model, we show that selecting specific subsets of its breakdown into algebraic atoms obtained via subdirect decomposition gives a model that generalizes. We validate this new learning principle on standard datasets such as MNIST, FashionMNIST, CIFAR-10, and medical images, achieving performance comparable to optimized multilayer perceptrons. Beyond data-driven tasks, the new learning principle extends to formal problems, such as finding Hamiltonian cycles from their specifications and without relying on search. This algebraic foundation offers a fresh perspective on machine intelligence, featuring direct learning from training data without the need for validation dataset, scaling through model additivity, and asymptotic convergence to the underlying rule in the data.
Authors: Yuan-Chih Yang, Hung-Hsuan Chen
Abstract: Dropout and DropConnect are well-known techniques that apply a consistent drop rate to randomly deactivate neurons or edges in a neural network layer during training. This paper introduces a novel methodology that assigns dynamic drop rates to each edge within a layer, uniquely tailoring the dropping process without incorporating additional learning parameters. We perform experiments on synthetic and openly available datasets to validate the effectiveness of our approach. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms Dropout, DropConnect, and Standout, a classic mechanism known for its adaptive dropout capabilities. Furthermore, our approach improves the robustness and generalization of neural network training without increasing computational complexity. The complete implementation of our methodology is publicly accessible for research and replication purposes at https://github.com/ericabd888/Adjusting-the-drop-probability-in-DropConnect-based-on-the-magnitude-of-the-gradient/.
Authors: Yu Yan, Sheng Sun, Zixiang Tang, Teli Liu, Min Liu
Abstract: Stance detection on social media aims to identify attitudes expressed in tweets towards specific targets. Current studies prioritize Large Language Models (LLMs) over Small Language Models (SLMs) due to the overwhelming performance improving provided by LLMs. However, heavily relying on LLMs for stance detection, regardless of the cost, is impractical for real-world social media monitoring systems that require vast data analysis. To this end, we propose \textbf{\underline{Co}}llaborative Stance Detection via Small-Large Language Model Consistency \textbf{\underline{Ver}}ification (\textbf{CoVer}) framework, which enhances LLM utilization via context-shared batch reasoning and logical verification between LLM and SLM. Specifically, instead of processing each text individually, CoVer processes texts batch-by-batch, obtaining stance predictions and corresponding explanations via LLM reasoning in a shared context. Then, to exclude the bias caused by context noises, CoVer introduces the SLM for logical consistency verification. Finally, texts that repeatedly exhibit low logical consistency are classified using consistency-weighted aggregation of prior LLM stance predictions. Our experiments show that CoVer outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks in the zero-shot setting, achieving 0.54 LLM queries per tweet while significantly enhancing performance. Our CoVer offers a more practical solution for LLM deploying for social media stance detection.
Authors: Javier Coronado-Bl\'azquez
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed text generation through inherently probabilistic context-aware mechanisms, mimicking human natural language. In this paper, we systematically investigate the performance of various LLMs when generating random numbers, considering diverse configurations such as different model architectures, numerical ranges, temperature, and prompt languages. Our results reveal that, despite their stochastic transformers-based architecture, these models often exhibit deterministic responses when prompted for random numerical outputs. In particular, we find significant differences when changing the model, as well as the prompt language, attributing this phenomenon to biases deeply embedded within the training data. Models such as DeepSeek-R1 can shed some light on the internal reasoning process of LLMs, despite arriving to similar results. These biases induce predictable patterns that undermine genuine randomness, as LLMs are nothing but reproducing our own human cognitive biases.
Authors: Gengyuan Hu, Wanli Ouyang, Chao-Yang Lu, Chen Lin, Han-Sen Zhong
Abstract: Quantum error correction is crucial for large-scale quantum computing, but the absence of efficient decoders for new codes like quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes has hindered progress. Here we introduce a universal decoder based on linear attention sequence modeling and graph neural network that operates directly on any stabilizer code's graph structure. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that this decoder outperforms specialized algorithms in both accuracy and speed across diverse stabilizer codes, including surface codes, color codes, and QLDPC codes. The decoder maintains linear time scaling with syndrome measurements and requires no structural modifications between different codes. For the Bivariate Bicycle code with distance 12, our approach achieves a 39.4% lower logical error rate than previous best decoders while requiring only ~1% of the decoding time. These results provide a practical, universal solution for quantum error correction, eliminating the need for code-specific decoders.
Authors: Chao Wang, Luning Zhang, Zheng Wang, Yang Zhou
Abstract: Combining multiple perceptual inputs and performing combinatorial reasoning in complex scenarios is a sophisticated cognitive function in humans. With advancements in multi-modal large language models, recent benchmarks tend to evaluate visual understanding across multiple images. However, they often overlook the necessity of combinatorial reasoning across multiple perceptual information. To explore the ability of advanced models to integrate multiple perceptual inputs for combinatorial reasoning in complex scenarios, we introduce two benchmarks: Clue-Visual Question Answering (CVQA), with three task types to assess visual comprehension and synthesis, and Clue of Password-Visual Question Answering (CPVQA), with two task types focused on accurate interpretation and application of visual data. For our benchmarks, we present three plug-and-play approaches: utilizing model input for reasoning, enhancing reasoning through minimum margin decoding with randomness generation, and retrieving semantically relevant visual information for effective data integration. The combined results reveal current models' poor performance on combinatorial reasoning benchmarks, even the state-of-the-art (SOTA) closed-source model achieves only 33.04% accuracy on CVQA, and drops to 7.38% on CPVQA. Notably, our approach improves the performance of models on combinatorial reasoning, with a 22.17% boost on CVQA and 9.40% on CPVQA over the SOTA closed-source model, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing combinatorial reasoning with multiple perceptual inputs in complex scenarios. The code will be publicly available.
Authors: Guannan Lai, Yujie Li, Xiangkun Wang, Junbo Zhang, Tianrui Li, Xin Yang
Abstract: Class Incremental Learning (CIL) requires a model to continuously learn new classes without forgetting previously learned ones. While recent studies have significantly alleviated the problem of catastrophic forgetting (CF), more and more research reveals that the order in which classes appear have significant influences on CIL models. Specifically, prioritizing the learning of classes with lower similarity will enhance the model's generalization performance and its ability to mitigate forgetting. Hence, it is imperative to develop an order-robust class incremental learning model that maintains stable performance even when faced with varying levels of class similarity in different orders. In response, we first provide additional theoretical analysis, which reveals that when the similarity among a group of classes is lower, the model demonstrates increased robustness to the class order. Then, we introduce a novel \textbf{G}raph-\textbf{D}riven \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{S}imilarity \textbf{G}rouping (\textbf{GDDSG}) method, which leverages a graph coloring algorithm for class-based similarity grouping. The proposed approach trains independent CIL models for each group of classes, ultimately combining these models to facilitate joint prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively addresses the issue of class order sensitivity while achieving optimal performance in both model accuracy and anti-forgetting capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIGNLAI/GDDSG.
Authors: Nian Shao, Rui Zhou, Pengyu Wang, Xian Li, Ying Fang, Yujie Yang, Xiaofei Li
Abstract: In this work, we propose CleanMel, a single-channel Mel-spectrogram denoising and dereverberation network for improving both speech quality and automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. The proposed network takes as input the noisy and reverberant microphone recording and predicts the corresponding clean Mel-spectrogram. The enhanced Mel-spectrogram can be either transformed to speech waveform with a neural vocoder or directly used for ASR. The proposed network is composed of interleaved cross-band and narrow-band processing in the Mel-frequency domain, for learning the full-band spectral pattern and the narrow-band properties of signals, respectively. Compared to linear-frequency domain or time-domain speech enhancement, the key advantage of Mel-spectrogram enhancement is that Mel-frequency presents speech in a more compact way and thus is easier to learn, which will benefit both speech quality and ASR. Experimental results on four English and one Chinese datasets demonstrate a significant improvement in both speech quality and ASR performance achieved by the proposed model. Code and audio examples of our model are available online in https://audio.westlake.edu.cn/Research/CleanMel.html.
Authors: Hengyu Meng, Duotun Wang, Zhijing Shao, Ligang Liu, Zeyu Wang
Abstract: Professional 3D asset creation often requires diverse sculpting brushes to add surface details and geometric structures. Despite recent progress in 3D generation, producing reusable sculpting brushes compatible with artists' workflows remains an open and challenging problem. These sculpting brushes are typically represented as vector displacement maps (VDMs), which existing models cannot easily generate compared to natural images. This paper presents Text2VDM, a novel framework for text-to-VDM brush generation through the deformation of a dense planar mesh guided by score distillation sampling (SDS). The original SDS loss is designed for generating full objects and struggles with generating desirable sub-object structures from scratch in brush generation. We refer to this issue as semantic coupling, which we address by introducing classifier-free guidance (CFG) weighted blending of prompt tokens to SDS, resulting in a more accurate target distribution and semantic guidance. Experiments demonstrate that Text2VDM can generate diverse, high-quality VDM brushes for sculpting surface details and geometric structures. Our generated brushes can be seamlessly integrated into mainstream modeling software, enabling various applications such as mesh stylization and real-time interactive modeling.
Authors: Marta Lango, Borys Naglik, Mateusz Lango, Iwo Naglik
Abstract: Aspect-Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is one of the most challenging and complex tasks in sentiment analysis. It concerns the construction of triplets that contain an aspect, its associated sentiment polarity, and an opinion phrase that serves as a rationale for the assigned polarity. Despite the growing popularity of the task and the many machine learning methods being proposed to address it, the number of datasets for ASTE is very limited. In particular, no dataset is available for any of the Slavic languages. In this paper, we present two new datasets for ASTE containing customer opinions about hotels and purchased products expressed in Polish. We also perform experiments with two ASTE techniques combined with two large language models for Polish to investigate their performance and the difficulty of the assembled datasets. The new datasets are available under a permissive licence and have the same file format as the English datasets, facilitating their use in future research.
Authors: Kang Liu, Zhuoqi Ma, Xiaolu Kang, Yunan Li, Kun Xie, Zhicheng Jiao, Qiguang Miao
Abstract: Automated radiology report generation offers an effective solution to alleviate radiologists' workload. However, most existing methods focus primarily on single or fixed-view images to model current disease conditions, which limits diagnostic accuracy and overlooks disease progression. Although some approaches utilize longitudinal data to track disease progression, they still rely on single images to analyze current visits. To address these issues, we propose enhanced contrastive learning with Multi-view Longitudinal data to facilitate chest X-ray Report Generation, named MLRG. Specifically, we introduce a multi-view longitudinal contrastive learning method that integrates spatial information from current multi-view images and temporal information from longitudinal data. This method also utilizes the inherent spatiotemporal information of radiology reports to supervise the pre-training of visual and textual representations. Subsequently, we present a tokenized absence encoding technique to flexibly handle missing patient-specific prior knowledge, allowing the model to produce more accurate radiology reports based on available prior knowledge. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR, MIMIC-ABN, and Two-view CXR datasets demonstrate that our MLRG outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 2.3% BLEU-4 improvement on MIMIC-CXR, a 5.5% F1 score improvement on MIMIC-ABN, and a 2.7% F1 RadGraph improvement on Two-view CXR.
Authors: Haochen Sun, Shuwen Zhang, Lei Ren, Hao Xu, Hao Fu, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) based agent systems have made great strides in real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. This paper proposes a new LLM-powered Multi-Agent System (LLM-MAS) benchmark, Collab-Overcooked, built on the popular Overcooked-AI game with more applicable and challenging tasks in interactive environments. Collab-Overcooked extends existing benchmarks from two novel perspectives. First, it provides a multi-agent framework supporting diverse tasks and objectives and encourages collaboration through natural language communication. Second, it introduces a spectrum of process-oriented evaluation metrics to assess the fine-grained collaboration capabilities of different LLM agents, a dimension often overlooked in prior work. We conduct extensive experiments over 10 popular LLMs and show that, while the LLMs present a strong ability in goal interpretation, there is a significant discrepancy in active collaboration and continuous adaption that are critical for efficiently fulfilling complicated tasks. Notably, we highlight the strengths and weaknesses in LLM-MAS and provide insights for improving and evaluating LLM-MAS on a unified and open-sourced benchmark. Environments, 30 open-ended tasks, and an integrated evaluation package are now publicly available at https://github.com/YusaeMeow/Collab-Overcooked.
Authors: Haicheng Liao, Chengyue Wang, Kaiqun Zhu, Yilong Ren, Bolin Gao, Shengbo Eben Li, Chengzhong Xu, Zhenning Li
Abstract: In mixed autonomous driving environments, accurately predicting the future trajectories of surrounding vehicles is crucial for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In driving scenarios, a vehicle's trajectory is determined by the decision-making process of human drivers. However, existing models primarily focus on the inherent statistical patterns in the data, often neglecting the critical aspect of understanding the decision-making processes of human drivers. This oversight results in models that fail to capture the true intentions of human drivers, leading to suboptimal performance in long-term trajectory prediction. To address this limitation, we introduce a Cognitive-Informed Transformer (CITF) that incorporates a cognitive concept, Perceived Safety, to interpret drivers' decision-making mechanisms. Perceived Safety encapsulates the varying risk tolerances across drivers with different driving behaviors. Specifically, we develop a Perceived Safety-aware Module that includes a Quantitative Safety Assessment for measuring the subject risk levels within scenarios, and Driver Behavior Profiling for characterizing driver behaviors. Furthermore, we present a novel module, Leanformer, designed to capture social interactions among vehicles. CITF demonstrates significant performance improvements on three well-established datasets. In terms of long-term prediction, it surpasses existing benchmarks by 12.0% on the NGSIM, 28.2% on the HighD, and 20.8% on the MoCAD dataset. Additionally, its robustness in scenarios with limited or missing data is evident, surpassing most state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, and paving the way for real-world applications.
Authors: Adib Karimi, Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh
Abstract: We introduce a novel Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) approach that overcomes limitations of fixed reward assignments and constrained flexibility in implicit reward regularization. By extending the Maximum Entropy IRL framework with a squared temporal-difference (TD) regularizer and adaptive targets, dynamically adjusted during training, our method indirectly optimizes a reward function while incorporating reinforcement learning principles. Furthermore, we integrate distributional RL to capture richer return information. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MuJoCo tasks, demonstrating expert-level results on the Humanoid task with only 3 demonstrations. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our method, providing insights into adaptive targets and reward dynamics in imitation learning.
Authors: Mingjie Wu, Chenggui Yang, Huihua Wang, Chen Xue, Yibo Wang, Haoyu Wang, Yansong Wang, Can Peng, Yuqi Han, Ruoyu Li, Lijun Yun, Zaiqing Chen, Songfan Shi, Luhao Fang, Shuyi Wan, Tingfeng Li, Shuangyao Liu, Haotian Feng
Abstract: The UAV technology is gradually maturing and can provide extremely powerful support for smart agriculture and precise monitoring. Currently, there is no dataset related to green walnuts in the field of agricultural computer vision. Thus, in order to promote the algorithm design in the field of agricultural computer vision, we used UAV to collect remote-sensing data from 8 walnut sample plots. Considering that green walnuts are subject to various lighting conditions and occlusion, we constructed a large-scale dataset with a higher-granularity of target features - WalnutData. This dataset contains a total of 30,240 images and 706,208 instances, and there are 4 target categories: being illuminated by frontal light and unoccluded (A1), being backlit and unoccluded (A2), being illuminated by frontal light and occluded (B1), and being backlit and occluded (B2). Subsequently, we evaluated many mainstream algorithms on WalnutData and used these evaluation results as the baseline standard. The dataset and all evaluation results can be obtained at https://github.com/1wuming/WalnutData.
Authors: Juan L. Gamella, Simon Bing, Jakob Runge
Abstract: We evaluate methods for causal representation learning (CRL) on a simple, real-world system where these methods are expected to work. The system consists of a controlled optical experiment specifically built for this purpose, which satisfies the core assumptions of CRL and where the underlying causal factors (the inputs to the experiment) are known, providing a ground truth. We select methods representative of different approaches to CRL and find that they all fail to recover the underlying causal factors. To understand the failure modes of the evaluated algorithms, we perform an ablation on the data by substituting the real data-generating process with a simpler synthetic equivalent. The results reveal a reproducibility problem, as most methods already fail on this synthetic ablation despite its simple data-generating process. Additionally, we observe that common assumptions on the mixing function are crucial for the performance of some of the methods but do not hold in the real data. Our efforts highlight the contrast between the theoretical promise of the state of the art and the challenges in its application. We hope the benchmark serves as a simple, real-world sanity check to further develop and validate methodology, bridging the gap towards CRL methods that work in practice. We make all code and datasets publicly available at github.com/simonbing/CRLSanityCheck
Authors: Mengjie Xu, Yitao Zhu, Haotian Jiang, Jiaming Li, Zhenrong Shen, Sheng Wang, Haolin Huang, Xinyu Wang, Qing Yang, Han Zhang, Qian Wang
Abstract: Multi-view object tracking (MVOT) offers promising solutions to challenges such as occlusion and target loss, which are common in traditional single-view tracking. However, progress has been limited by the lack of comprehensive multi-view datasets and effective cross-view integration methods. To overcome these limitations, we compiled a Multi-View object Tracking (MVTrack) dataset of 234K high-quality annotated frames featuring 27 distinct objects across various scenes. In conjunction with this dataset, we introduce a novel MVOT method, Multi-View Integration Tracker (MITracker), to efficiently integrate multi-view object features and provide stable tracking outcomes. MITracker can track any object in video frames of arbitrary length from arbitrary viewpoints. The key advancements of our method over traditional single-view approaches come from two aspects: (1) MITracker transforms 2D image features into a 3D feature volume and compresses it into a bird's eye view (BEV) plane, facilitating inter-view information fusion; (2) we propose an attention mechanism that leverages geometric information from fused 3D feature volume to refine the tracking results at each view. MITracker outperforms existing methods on the MVTrack and GMTD datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The code and the new dataset will be available at https://mii-laboratory.github.io/MITracker/.
Authors: Prasun Dutta, Koustab Ghosh, Rajat K. De
Abstract: The most popular technique to train a neural network is backpropagation. Recently, the Forward-Forward technique has also been introduced for certain learning tasks. However, in real life, human learning does not follow any of these techniques exclusively. The way a human learns is basically a combination of forward learning, backward propagation and cooperation. Humans start learning a new concept by themselves and try to refine their understanding hierarchically during which they might come across several doubts. The most common approach to doubt solving is a discussion with peers, which can be called cooperation. Cooperation/discussion/knowledge sharing among peers is one of the most important steps of learning that humans follow. However, there might still be a few doubts even after the discussion. Then the difference between the understanding of the concept and the original literature is identified and minimized over several revisions. Inspired by this, the paper introduces Forward-Cooperation-Backward (FCB) learning in a deep neural network framework mimicking the human nature of learning a new concept. A novel deep neural network architecture, called Multi Encoding Uni Decoding neural network model, has been designed which learns using the notion of FCB. A special lateral synaptic connection has also been introduced to realize cooperation. The models have been justified in terms of their performance in dimension reduction on four popular datasets. The ability to preserve the granular properties of data in low-rank embedding has been tested to justify the quality of dimension reduction. For downstream analyses, classification has also been performed. An experimental study on convergence analysis has been performed to establish the efficacy of the FCB learning strategy.
Authors: Tergel Munkhbat, Namgyu Ho, Seohyun Kim, Yongjin Yang, Yujin Kim, Se-Young Yun
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens, incurring extraneous inference costs. Upon examination of the output distribution of current LLMs, we find evidence on their latent ability to reason more concisely, relative to their default behavior. To elicit this capability, we propose simple fine-tuning methods which leverage self-generated concise reasoning paths obtained by best-of-N sampling and few-shot conditioning, in task-specific settings. Our combined method achieves a 30% reduction in output tokens on average, across five model families on GSM8K and MATH, while maintaining average accuracy. By exploiting the fundamental stochasticity and in-context learning capabilities of LLMs, our self-training approach robustly elicits concise reasoning on a wide range of models, including those with extensive post-training. Code is available at https://github.com/TergelMunkhbat/concise-reasoning
Authors: Yujie Li, Guannan Lai, Xin Yang, Yonghao Li, Marcello Bonsangue, Tianrui Li
Abstract: Open-World Continual Learning (OWCL) is a challenging paradigm where models must incrementally learn new knowledge without forgetting while operating under an open-world assumption. This requires handling incomplete training data and recognizing unknown samples during inference. However, existing OWCL methods often treat open detection and continual learning as separate tasks, limiting their ability to integrate open-set detection and incremental classification in OWCL. Moreover, current approaches primarily focus on transferring knowledge from known samples, neglecting the insights derived from unknown/open samples. To address these limitations, we formalize four distinct OWCL scenarios and conduct comprehensive empirical experiments to explore potential challenges in OWCL. Our findings reveal a significant interplay between the open detection of unknowns and incremental classification of knowns, challenging a widely held assumption that unknown detection and known classification are orthogonal processes. Building on our insights, we propose \textbf{HoliTrans} (Holistic Knowns-Unknowns Knowledge Transfer), a novel OWCL framework that integrates nonlinear random projection (NRP) to create a more linearly separable embedding space and distribution-aware prototypes (DAPs) to construct an adaptive knowledge space. Particularly, our HoliTrans effectively supports knowledge transfer for both known and unknown samples while dynamically updating representations of open samples during OWCL. Extensive experiments across various OWCL scenarios demonstrate that HoliTrans outperforms 22 competitive baselines, bridging the gap between OWCL theory and practice and providing a robust, scalable framework for advancing open-world learning paradigms.
Authors: Zexiong Ma, Chao Peng, Pengfei Gao, Xiangxin Meng, Yanzhen Zou, Bing Xie
Abstract: Mainstream issue-resolving frameworks predominantly rely on commercial models, leading to high costs and privacy concerns. Existing training approaches for issue resolving struggle with poor generalization and fail to fully leverage open-source development resources. We propose Subtask-oriented Reinforced Fine-Tuning (SoRFT), a novel training approach to enhance the issue resolving capability of LLMs. We decomposes issue resolving into structured subtasks: file localization, function localization, line localization, and code edit generation. SoRFT consists of two training stages: (1) rejection-sampled supervised fine-tuning, Chain of Thought (CoT) data is filtered using ground-truth before fine-tuning the LLM, and (2) rule-based reinforcement learning, which leverages PPO with ground-truth based rewards. We evaluate the SoRFT-trained model on SWE-Bench Verified and SWE-Bench Lite, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among open-source models (e.g., resolve 21.4% issues on SWE-Bench Verified with SoRFT-Qwen-7B). The experimental results demonstrate that SoRFT significantly enhances issue-resolving performance, improves model generalization, and provides a cost-efficient alternative to commercial models.
Authors: Thomas Norrenbrock, Timo Kaiser, Sovan Biswas, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Bodo Rosenhahn
Abstract: Understanding the classifications of deep neural networks, e.g. used in safety-critical situations, is becoming increasingly important. While recent models can locally explain a single decision, to provide a faithful global explanation about an accurate model's general behavior is a more challenging open task. Towards that goal, we introduce the Quadratic Programming Enhanced Model (QPM), which learns globally interpretable class representations. QPM represents every class with a binary assignment of very few, typically 5, features, that are also assigned to other classes, ensuring easily comparable contrastive class representations. This compact binary assignment is found using discrete optimization based on predefined similarity measures and interpretability constraints. The resulting optimal assignment is used to fine-tune the diverse features, so that each of them becomes the shared general concept between the assigned classes. Extensive evaluations show that QPM delivers unprecedented global interpretability across small and large-scale datasets while setting the state of the art for the accuracy of interpretable models.
Authors: Yifan Jia, Xingda Yu, Zhengyang Ji, Songning Lai, Yutao Yue
Abstract: Immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining plays a significant role in the evaluation of diseases such as breast cancer. The H&E-to-IHC transformation based on generative models provides a simple and cost-effective method for obtaining IHC images. Although previous models can perform digital coloring well, they still suffer from (i) coloring only through the pixel features that are not prominent in HE, which is easy to cause information loss in the coloring process; (ii) The lack of pixel-perfect H&E-IHC groundtruth pairs poses a challenge to the classical L1 loss.To address the above challenges, we propose an adaptive information enhanced coloring framework based on feature extractors. We first propose the VMFE module to effectively extract the color information features using multi-scale feature extraction and wavelet transform convolution, while combining the shared decoder for feature fusion. The high-performance dual feature extractor of H&E-IHC is trained by contrastive learning, which can effectively perform feature alignment of HE-IHC in high latitude space. At the same time, the trained feature encoder is used to enhance the features and adaptively adjust the loss in the HE section staining process to solve the problems related to unclear and asymmetric information. We have tested on different datasets and achieved excellent performance.Our code is available at https://github.com/babyinsunshine/CEFF
Authors: Maria Krinner, Elie Aljalbout, Angel Romero, Davide Scaramuzza
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for robot learning. However, model-free RL (MFRL) requires a large number of environment interactions to learn successful control policies. This is due to the noisy RL training updates and the complexity of robotic systems, which typically involve highly non-linear dynamics and noisy sensor signals. In contrast, model-based RL (MBRL) not only trains a policy but simultaneously learns a world model that captures the environment's dynamics and rewards. The world model can either be used for planning, for data collection, or to provide first-order policy gradients for training. Leveraging a world model significantly improves sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, training a world model alongside the policy increases the computational complexity, leading to longer training times that are often intractable for complex real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a new method for accelerating model-based RL using state-space world models. Our approach leverages state-space models (SSMs) to parallelize the training of the dynamics model, which is typically the main computational bottleneck. Additionally, we propose an architecture that provides privileged information to the world model during training, which is particularly relevant for partially observable environments. We evaluate our method in several real-world agile quadrotor flight tasks, involving complex dynamics, for both fully and partially observable environments. We demonstrate a significant speedup, reducing the world model training time by up to 10 times, and the overall MBRL training time by up to 4 times. This benefit comes without compromising performance, as our method achieves similar sample efficiency and task rewards to state-of-the-art MBRL methods.
Authors: Zhouyu He, Peng Qiao, Rongchun Li, Yong Dou, Yusong Tan
Abstract: As the demands for superior agents grow, the training complexity of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) becomes higher. Thus, accelerating training of DRL has become a major research focus. Dividing the DRL training process into subtasks and using parallel computation can effectively reduce training costs. However, current DRL training systems lack sufficient parallelization due to data assignment between subtask components. This assignment issue has been ignored, but addressing it can further boost training efficiency. Therefore, we propose a high-throughput distributed RL training system called TianJi. It relaxes assignment dependencies between subtask components and enables event-driven asynchronous communication. Meanwhile, TianJi maintains clear boundaries between subtask components. To address convergence uncertainty from relaxed assignment dependencies, TianJi proposes a distributed strategy based on the balance of sample production and consumption. The strategy controls the staleness of samples to correct their quality, ensuring convergence. We conducted extensive experiments. TianJi achieves a convergence time acceleration ratio of up to 4.37 compared to related comparison systems. When scaled to eight computational nodes, TianJi shows a convergence time speedup of 1.6 and a throughput speedup of 7.13 relative to XingTian, demonstrating its capability to accelerate training and scalability. In data transmission efficiency experiments, TianJi significantly outperforms other systems, approaching hardware limits. TianJi also shows effectiveness in on-policy algorithms, achieving convergence time acceleration ratios of 4.36 and 2.95 compared to RLlib and XingTian. TianJi is accessible at https://github.com/HiPRL/TianJi.git.
Authors: Luis Marquez-Carpintero, Sergio Suescun-Ferrandiz, Carolina Lorenzo \'Alvarez, Jorge Fernandez-Herrero, Diego Viejo, Rosabel Roig-Vila, Miguel Cazorla
Abstract: In this paper, a novel dataset is introduced, designed to assess student attention within in-person classroom settings. This dataset encompasses RGB camera data, featuring multiple cameras per student to capture both posture and facial expressions, in addition to smartwatch sensor data for each individual. This dataset allows machine learning algorithms to be trained to predict attention and correlate it with emotion. A comprehensive suite of attention and emotion labels for each student is provided, generated through self-reporting as well as evaluations by four different experts. Our dataset uniquely combines facial and environmental camera data, smartwatch metrics, and includes underrepresented ethnicities in similar datasets, all within in-the-wild, in-person settings, making it the most comprehensive dataset of its kind currently available. The dataset presented offers an extensive and diverse collection of data pertaining to student interactions across different educational contexts, augmented with additional metadata from other tools. This initiative addresses existing deficiencies by offering a valuable resource for the analysis of student attention and emotion in face-to-face lessons.
Authors: Mingqiang Han, Chunlin Yi
Abstract: To maximize palm oil yield and quality, it is essential to harvest palm fruit at the optimal maturity stage. This project aims to develop an automated computer vision system capable of accurately classifying palm fruit images into five ripeness levels. We employ deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to classify palm fruit images based on their maturity stage. A shallow CNN serves as the baseline model, while transfer learning and fine-tuning are applied to pre-trained ResNet50 and InceptionV3 architectures. The study utilizes a publicly available dataset of over 8,000 images with significant variations, which is split into 80\% for training and 20\% for testing. The proposed deep CNN models achieve test accuracies exceeding 85\% in classifying palm fruit maturity stages. This research highlights the potential of deep learning for automating palm fruit ripeness assessment, which can contribute to optimizing harvesting decisions and improving palm oil production efficiency.
Authors: Wei Yang, Yiran Zhu, Jiayu Shen, Yuhan Tang, Chengchang Pan, Hui He, Yan Su, Honggang Qi
Abstract: Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), a prevalent complication among diabetic patients, constitutes a major cause of visual impairment and blindness. Although deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in medical image analysis, traditional DME diagnosis still relies on extensive annotated data and subjective ophthalmologist assessments, limiting practical applications. To address this, we present RURANET++, an unsupervised learning-based automated DME diagnostic system. This framework incorporates an optimized U-Net architecture with embedded Spatial and Channel Squeeze & Excitation (SCSE) attention mechanisms to enhance lesion feature extraction. During feature processing, a pre-trained GoogLeNet model extracts deep features from retinal images, followed by PCA-based dimensionality reduction to 50 dimensions for computational efficiency. Notably, we introduce a novel clustering algorithm employing multi-projection heads to explicitly control cluster diversity while dynamically adjusting similarity thresholds, thereby optimizing intra-class consistency and inter-class discrimination. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance across multiple metrics, achieving maximum accuracy (0.8411), precision (0.8593), recall (0.8411), and F1-score (0.8390), with exceptional clustering quality. This work provides an efficient unsupervised solution for DME diagnosis with significant clinical implications.
Authors: Daniela B\"ohm, Georg Gottlob, Matthias Lanzinger, Davide Longo, Cem Okulmus, Reinhard Pichler, Alexander Selzer
Abstract: Query optimization has played a central role in database research for decades. However, more often than not, the proposed optimization techniques lead to a performance improvement in some, but not in all, situations. Therefore, we urgently need a methodology for designing a decision procedure that decides for a given query whether the optimization technique should be applied or not. In this work, we propose such a methodology with a focus on Yannakakis-style query evaluation as our optimization technique of interest. More specifically, we formulate this decision problem as an algorithm selection problem and we present a Machine Learning based approach for its solution. Empirical results with several benchmarks on a variety of database systems show that our approach indeed leads to a statistically significant performance improvement.
Authors: Gianluca Bencomo, Max Gupta, Ioana Marinescu, R. Thomas McCoy, Thomas L. Griffiths
Abstract: Artificial neural networks can acquire many aspects of human knowledge from data, making them promising as models of human learning. But what those networks can learn depends upon their inductive biases -- the factors other than the data that influence the solutions they discover -- and the inductive biases of neural networks remain poorly understood, limiting our ability to draw conclusions about human learning from the performance of these systems. Cognitive scientists and machine learning researchers often focus on the architecture of a neural network as a source of inductive bias. In this paper we explore the impact of another source of inductive bias -- the initial weights of the network -- using meta-learning as a tool for finding initial weights that are adapted for specific problems. We evaluate four widely-used architectures -- MLPs, CNNs, LSTMs, and Transformers -- by meta-training 430 different models across three tasks requiring different biases and forms of generalization. We find that meta-learning can substantially reduce or entirely eliminate performance differences across architectures and data representations, suggesting that these factors may be less important as sources of inductive bias than is typically assumed. When differences are present, architectures and data representations that perform well without meta-learning tend to meta-train more effectively. Moreover, all architectures generalize poorly on problems that are far from their meta-training experience, underscoring the need for stronger inductive biases for robust generalization.
Authors: Amr Mohamed, Mingmeng Geng, Michalis Vazirgiannis, Guokan Shang
Abstract: As large language models are increasingly responsible for online content, concerns arise about the impact of repeatedly processing their own outputs. Inspired by the "broken telephone" effect in chained human communication, this study investigates whether LLMs similarly distort information through iterative generation. Through translation-based experiments, we find that distortion accumulates over time, influenced by language choice and chain complexity. While degradation is inevitable, it can be mitigated through strategic prompting techniques. These findings contribute to discussions on the long-term effects of AI-mediated information propagation, raising important questions about the reliability of LLM-generated content in iterative workflows.
Authors: Davor Vukadin, Marin \v{S}ili\'c, Goran Dela\v{c}
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. However, effectively leveraging their vast knowledge for training smaller downstream models remains an open challenge, especially in domains like tabular data learning, where simpler models are often preferred due to interpretability and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel yet straightforward method for incorporating LLM-generated global task feature attributions into the training process of smaller networks. Specifically, we propose an attribution-matching regularization term that aligns the training dynamics of the smaller model with the insights provided by the LLM. By doing so, our approach yields superior performance in few-shot learning scenarios. Notably, our method requires only black-box API access to the LLM, making it easy to integrate into existing training pipelines with minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this method can be used to address common issues in real-world datasets, such as skewness and bias. By integrating high-level knowledge from LLMs, our approach improves generalization, even when training data is limited or imbalanced. We validate its effectiveness through extensive experiments across multiple tasks, demonstrating improved learning efficiency and model robustness.
Authors: Qingsen Yan, Yixu Feng, Cheng Zhang, Guansong Pang, Kangbiao Shi, Peng Wu, Wei Dong, Jinqiu Sun, Yanning Zhang
Abstract: Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) is a crucial computer vision task that aims to restore detailed visual information from corrupted low-light images. Many existing LLIE methods are based on standard RGB (sRGB) space, which often produce color bias and brightness artifacts due to inherent high color sensitivity in sRGB. While converting the images using Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) color space helps resolve the brightness issue, it introduces significant red and black noise artifacts. To address this issue, we propose a new color space for LLIE, namely Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI), defined by polarized HS maps and learnable intensity. The former enforces small distances for red coordinates to remove the red artifacts, while the latter compresses the low-light regions to remove the black artifacts. To fully leverage the chromatic and intensity information, a novel Color and Intensity Decoupling Network (CIDNet) is further introduced to learn accurate photometric mapping function under different lighting conditions in the HVI space. Comprehensive results from benchmark and ablation experiments show that the proposed HVI color space with CIDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 10 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/HVI-CIDNet.
Authors: Palawat Busaranuvong, Emmanuel Agu, Reza Saadati Fard, Deepak Kumar, Shefalika Gautam, Bengisu Tulu, Diane Strong
Abstract: Infections in Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) can cause severe complications, including tissue death and limb amputation, highlighting the need for accurate, timely diagnosis. Previous machine learning methods have focused on identifying infections by analyzing wound images alone, without utilizing additional metadata such as medical notes. In this study, we aim to improve infection detection by introducing Synthetic Caption Augmented Retrieval for Wound Infection Detection (SCARWID), a novel deep learning framework that leverages synthetic textual descriptions to augment DFU images. SCARWID consists of two components: (1) Wound-BLIP, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) fine-tuned on GPT-4o-generated descriptions to synthesize consistent captions from images; and (2) an Image-Text Fusion module that uses cross-attention to extract cross-modal embeddings from an image and its corresponding Wound-BLIP caption. Infection status is determined by retrieving the top-k similar items from a labeled support set. To enhance the diversity of training data, we utilized a latent diffusion model to generate additional wound images. As a result, SCARWID outperformed state-of-the-art models, achieving average sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 0.85, 0.78, and 0.81, respectively, for wound infection classification. Displaying the generated captions alongside the wound images and infection detection results enhances interpretability and trust, enabling nurses to align SCARWID outputs with their medical knowledge. This is particularly valuable when wound notes are unavailable or when assisting novice nurses who may find it difficult to identify visual attributes of wound infection.
Authors: Benjamin Gutteridge, Matthew Thomas Jackson, Toni Kukurin, Xiaowen Dong
Abstract: Handwritten text recognition (HTR) remains a challenging task, particularly for multi-page documents where pages share common formatting and contextual features. While modern optical character recognition (OCR) engines are proficient with printed text, their performance on handwriting is limited, often requiring costly labeled data for fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore the use of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) for transcribing multi-page handwritten documents in a zero-shot setting. We investigate various configurations of commercial OCR engines and MLLMs, utilizing the latter both as end-to-end transcribers and as post-processors, with and without image components. We propose a novel method, '+first page', which enhances MLLM transcription by providing the OCR output of the entire document along with just the first page image. This approach leverages shared document features without incurring the high cost of processing all images. Experiments on a multi-page version of the IAM Handwriting Database demonstrate that '+first page' improves transcription accuracy, balances cost with performance, and even enhances results on out-of-sample text by extrapolating formatting and OCR error patterns from a single page.
Authors: Nathaniel Hoy, Theodora Koulouri
Abstract: Fake news poses global risks by influencing elections and spreading misinformation, making detection critical. Existing NLP and supervised Machine Learning methods perform well under cross-validation but struggle to generalise across datasets, even within the same domain. This issue stems from coarsely labelled training data, where articles are labelled based on their publisher, introducing biases that token-based models like TF-IDF and BERT are sensitive to. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise, their application in fake news detection remains limited. This study demonstrates that meaningful features can still be extracted from coarsely labelled data to improve real-world robustness. Stylistic features-lexical, syntactic, and semantic-are explored due to their reduced sensitivity to dataset biases. Additionally, novel social-monetisation features are introduced, capturing economic incentives behind fake news, such as advertisements, external links, and social media elements. The study trains on the coarsely labelled NELA 2020-21 dataset and evaluates using the manually labelled Facebook URLs dataset, a gold standard for generalisability. Results highlight the limitations of token-based models trained on biased data and contribute to the scarce evidence on LLMs like LLaMa in this field. Findings indicate that stylistic and social-monetisation features offer more generalisable predictions than token-based methods and LLMs. Statistical and permutation feature importance analyses further reveal their potential to enhance performance and mitigate dataset biases, providing a path forward for improving fake news detection.
Authors: Jinghao Feng, Qiaoyu Zheng, Chaoyi Wu, Ziheng Zhao, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
Abstract: Agentic AI systems have gained significant attention for their ability to autonomously perform complex tasks. However, their reliance on well-prepared tools limits their applicability in the medical domain, which requires to train specialized models. In this paper, we make three contributions: (i) We present M3Builder, a novel multi-agent system designed to automate machine learning (ML) in medical imaging. At its core, M3Builder employs four specialized agents that collaborate to tackle complex, multi-step medical ML workflows, from automated data processing and environment configuration to self-contained auto debugging and model training. These agents operate within a medical imaging ML workspace, a structured environment designed to provide agents with free-text descriptions of datasets, training codes, and interaction tools, enabling seamless communication and task execution. (ii) To evaluate progress in automated medical imaging ML, we propose M3Bench, a benchmark comprising four general tasks on 14 training datasets, across five anatomies and three imaging modalities, covering both 2D and 3D data. (iii) We experiment with seven state-of-the-art large language models serving as agent cores for our system, such as Claude series, GPT-4o, and DeepSeek-V3. Compared to existing ML agentic designs, M3Builder shows superior performance on completing ML tasks in medical imaging, achieving a 94.29% success rate using Claude-3.7-Sonnet as the agent core, showing huge potential towards fully automated machine learning in medical imaging.
Authors: Shangyin Tan, Lakshya A Agrawal, Arnav Singhvi, Liheng Lai, Michael J Ryan, Dan Klein, Omar Khattab, Koushik Sen, Matei Zaharia
Abstract: Composing language models (LMs) into multi-step language programs and automatically optimizing their modular prompts is now a mainstream paradigm for building AI systems, but the tradeoffs in this space have only scarcely been studied before. We introduce LangProBe, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating the architectures and optimization strategies for language programs, with over 2000 combinations of tasks, architectures, optimizers, and choices of LMs. Using LangProBe, we are the first to study the impact of program architectures and optimizers (and their compositions together and with different models) on tradeoffs of quality and cost. We find that optimized language programs offer strong cost--quality Pareto improvement over raw calls to models, but simultaneously demonstrate that human judgment (or empirical decisions) about which compositions to pursue is still necessary for best performance. We will open source the code and evaluation data for LangProBe.
Authors: Mohamed Abdelsamad, Michael Ulrich, Claudius Gl\"aser, Abhinav Valada
Abstract: Masked autoencoders (MAE) have shown tremendous potential for self-supervised learning (SSL) in vision and beyond. However, point clouds from LiDARs used in automated driving are particularly challenging for MAEs since large areas of the 3D volume are empty. Consequently, existing work suffers from leaking occupancy information into the decoder and has significant computational complexity, thereby limiting the SSL pre-training to only 2D bird's eye view encoders in practice. In this work, we propose the novel neighborhood occupancy MAE (NOMAE) that overcomes the aforementioned challenges by employing masked occupancy reconstruction only in the neighborhood of non-masked voxels. We incorporate voxel masking and occupancy reconstruction at multiple scales with our proposed hierarchical mask generation technique to capture features of objects of different sizes in the point cloud. NOMAEs are extremely flexible and can be directly employed for SSL in existing 3D architectures. We perform extensive evaluations on the nuScenes and Waymo Open datasets for the downstream perception tasks of semantic segmentation and 3D object detection, comparing with both discriminative and generative SSL methods. The results demonstrate that NOMAE sets the new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks for multiple point cloud perception tasks.
Authors: Yongjia Lei, Haoyu Han, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Mahantesh M Halappanavar, Jiliang Tang, Yu Wang
Abstract: Text-rich Graph Knowledge Bases (TG-KBs) have become increasingly crucial for answering queries by providing textual and structural knowledge. However, current retrieval methods often retrieve these two types of knowledge in isolation without considering their mutual reinforcement and some hybrid methods even bypass structural retrieval entirely after neighboring aggregation. To fill in this gap, we propose a Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval (MoR) to retrieve these two types of knowledge via a Planning-Reasoning-Organizing framework. In the Planning stage, MoR generates textual planning graphs delineating the logic for answering queries. Following planning graphs, in the Reasoning stage, MoR interweaves structural traversal and textual matching to obtain candidates from TG-KBs. In the Organizing stage, MoR further reranks fetched candidates based on their structural trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MoR in harmonizing structural and textual retrieval with insights, including uneven retrieving performance across different query logics and the benefits of integrating structural trajectories for candidate reranking. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yoega/MoR.
Authors: Chuofan Ma, Yi Jiang, Junfeng Wu, Jihan Yang, Xin Yu, Zehuan Yuan, Bingyue Peng, Xiaojuan Qi
Abstract: The representation disparity between visual generation and understanding imposes a critical gap in integrating these capabilities into a single framework. To bridge this gap, we introduce UniTok, a discrete visual tokenizer that encodes fine-grained details for generation while also capturing high-level semantics for understanding. Despite recent studies have shown that these objectives could induce loss conflicts in training, we reveal that the underlying bottleneck stems from limited representational capacity of discrete tokens. We address this by introducing multi-codebook quantization, which divides vector quantization with several independent sub-codebooks to expand the latent feature space, while avoiding training instability caused by overlarge codebooks. Our method significantly raises the upper limit of unified discrete tokenizers to match or even surpass domain-specific continuous tokenizers. For instance, UniTok achieves a remarkable rFID of 0.38 (versus 0.87 for SD-VAE) and a zero-shot accuracy of 78.6% (versus 76.2% for CLIP) on ImageNet. Our code is available at https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniTok.
Authors: Thomas Hickling, Maxwell Hogan, Abdulla Tammam, Nabil Aouf
Abstract: This paper proposes a holistic framework for autonomous guidance, navigation, and task distribution among multi-drone systems operating in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied indoor settings. We advocate for a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based guidance mechanism, utilising the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm. To improve the efficiency of the training process, we incorporate an Artificial Potential Field (APF)-based reward structure, enabling the agent to refine its movements, thereby promoting smoother paths and enhanced obstacle avoidance in indoor contexts. Furthermore, we tackle the issue of task distribution among cooperative UAVs through a DRL-trained Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). This GCN represents the interactions between drones and tasks, facilitating dynamic and real-time task allocation that reflects the current environmental conditions and the capabilities of the drones. Such an approach fosters effective coordination and collaboration among multiple drones during search and rescue operations or other exploratory endeavours. Lastly, to ensure precise odometry in environments lacking GNSS, we employ Light Detection And Ranging Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping complemented by a depth camera to mitigate the hallway problem. This integration offers robust localisation and mapping functionalities, thereby enhancing the systems dependability in indoor navigation. The proposed multi-drone framework not only elevates individual navigation capabilities but also optimises coordinated task allocation in complex, obstacle-laden environments. Experimental evaluations conducted in a setup tailored to meet the requirements of the NATO Sapience Autonomous Cooperative Drone Competition demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system, yielding outstanding results and culminating in a first-place finish in the 2024 Sapience competition.
Authors: Yukang Yang, Declan Campbell, Kaixuan Huang, Mengdi Wang, Jonathan Cohen, Taylor Webb
Abstract: Many recent studies have found evidence for emergent reasoning capabilities in large language models, but debate persists concerning the robustness of these capabilities, and the extent to which they depend on structured reasoning mechanisms. To shed light on these issues, we perform a comprehensive study of the internal mechanisms that support abstract rule induction in an open-source language model (Llama3-70B). We identify an emergent symbolic architecture that implements abstract reasoning via a series of three computations. In early layers, symbol abstraction heads convert input tokens to abstract variables based on the relations between those tokens. In intermediate layers, symbolic induction heads perform sequence induction over these abstract variables. Finally, in later layers, retrieval heads predict the next token by retrieving the value associated with the predicted abstract variable. These results point toward a resolution of the longstanding debate between symbolic and neural network approaches, suggesting that emergent reasoning in neural networks depends on the emergence of symbolic mechanisms.
Authors: Alan Ashworth, Munir Al-Dajani, Keegan Duchicela, Kiril Kafadarov, Allison Kurian, Othman Laraki, Amina Lazrak, Divneet Mandair, Wendy McKennon, Rebecca Miksad, Jayodita Sanghvi, Travis Zack
Abstract: Clinical decision-making depends on expert reasoning, which is guided by standardized, evidence-based guidelines. However, translating these guidelines into automated clinical decision support systems risks inaccuracy and importantly, loss of nuance. We share an application architecture, the Large Language Expert (LLE), that combines the flexibility and power of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the interpretability, explainability, and reliability of Expert Systems. LLMs help address key challenges of Expert Systems, such as integrating and codifying knowledge, and data normalization. Conversely, an Expert System-like approach helps overcome challenges with LLMs, including hallucinations, atomic and inexpensive updates, and testability. To highlight the power of the Large Language Expert (LLE) system, we built an LLE to assist with the workup of patients newly diagnosed with cancer. Timely initiation of cancer treatment is critical for optimal patient outcomes. However, increasing complexity in diagnostic recommendations has made it difficult for primary care physicians to ensure their patients have completed the necessary workup before their first visit with an oncologist. As with many real-world clinical tasks, these workups require the analysis of unstructured health records and the application of nuanced clinical decision logic. In this study, we describe the design & evaluation of an LLE system built to rapidly identify and suggest the correct diagnostic workup. The system demonstrated a high degree of clinical-level accuracy (>95%) and effectively addressed gaps identified in real-world data from breast and colon cancer patients at a large academic center.
Authors: Daniele Paliotta, Junxiong Wang, Matteo Pagliardini, Kevin Y. Li, Aviv Bick, J. Zico Kolter, Albert Gu, Fran\c{c}ois Fleuret, Tri Dao
Abstract: Recent advancements have demonstrated that the performance of large language models (LLMs) can be significantly enhanced by scaling computational resources at test time. A common strategy involves generating multiple Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories and aggregating their outputs through various selection mechanisms. This raises a fundamental question: can models with lower complexity leverage their superior generation throughput to outperform similarly sized Transformers for a fixed computational budget? To address this question and overcome the lack of strong subquadratic reasoners, we distill pure and hybrid Mamba models from pretrained Transformers. Trained on only 8 billion tokens, our distilled models show strong performance and scaling on mathematical reasoning datasets while being much faster at inference for large batches and long sequences. Despite the zero-shot performance hit due to distillation, both pure and hybrid Mamba models can scale their coverage and accuracy performance past their Transformer teacher models under fixed time budgets, opening a new direction for scaling inference compute.
Authors: Wilka Carvalho, Andrew Lampinen
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence increasingly pursues large, complex models that perform many tasks within increasingly realistic domains. How, if at all, should these developments in AI influence cognitive science? We argue that progress in AI offers timely opportunities for cognitive science to embrace experiments with increasingly naturalistic stimuli, tasks, and behaviors; and computational models that can accommodate these changes. We first review a growing body of research spanning neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI that suggests that incorporating a broader range of naturalistic experimental paradigms (and models that accommodate them) may be necessary to resolve some aspects of natural intelligence and ensure that our theories generalize. We then suggest that integrating recent progress in AI and cognitive science will enable us to engage with more naturalistic phenomena without giving up experimental control or the pursuit of theoretically grounded understanding. We offer practical guidance on how methodological practices can contribute to cumulative progress in naturalistic computational cognitive science, and illustrate a path towards building computational models that solve the real problems of natural cognition - together with a reductive understanding of the processes and principles by which they do so.
Authors: Kuan Lok Zhou, Jiayi Chen, Siddharth Suresh, Reuben Narad, Timothy T. Rogers, Lalit K Jain, Robert D Nowak, Bob Mankoff, Jifan Zhang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant limitations in understanding creative content, as demonstrated by Hessel et al. (2023)'s influential work on the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest (NYCCC). Their study exposed a substantial gap between LLMs and humans in humor comprehension, establishing that understanding and evaluating creative content is key challenge in AI development. We revisit this challenge by decomposing humor understanding into three components and systematically improve each: enhancing visual understanding through improved annotation, utilizing LLM-generated humor reasoning and explanations, and implementing targeted alignment with human preference data. Our refined approach achieves 82.4% accuracy in caption ranking, singificantly improving upon the previous 67% benchmark and matching the performance of world-renowned human experts in this domain. Notably, while attempts to mimic subgroup preferences through various persona prompts showed minimal impact, model finetuning with crowd preferences proved remarkably effective. These findings reveal that LLM limitations in creative judgment can be effectively addressed through focused alignment to specific subgroups and individuals. Lastly, we propose the position that achieving artificial general intelligence necessitates systematic collection of human preference data across creative domains. We advocate that just as human creativity is deeply influenced by individual and cultural preferences, training LLMs with diverse human preference data may be essential for developing true creative understanding.
Authors: Ryan C. Barron, Maksim E. Eren, Olga M. Serafimova, Cynthia Matuszek, Boian S. Alexandrov
Abstract: Agentic Generative AI, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and Vector Stores (VSs), represents a transformative technology applicable to specialized domains such as legal systems, research, recommender systems, cybersecurity, and global security, including proliferation research. This technology excels at inferring relationships within vast unstructured or semi-structured datasets. The legal domain here comprises complex data characterized by extensive, interrelated, and semi-structured knowledge systems with complex relations. It comprises constitutions, statutes, regulations, and case law. Extracting insights and navigating the intricate networks of legal documents and their relations is crucial for effective legal research. Here, we introduce a generative AI system that integrates RAG, VS, and KG, constructed via Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), to enhance legal information retrieval and AI reasoning and minimize hallucinations. In the legal system, these technologies empower AI agents to identify and analyze complex connections among cases, statutes, and legal precedents, uncovering hidden relationships and predicting legal trends-challenging tasks that are essential for ensuring justice and improving operational efficiency. Our system employs web scraping techniques to systematically collect legal texts, such as statutes, constitutional provisions, and case law, from publicly accessible platforms like Justia. It bridges the gap between traditional keyword-based searches and contextual understanding by leveraging advanced semantic representations, hierarchical relationships, and latent topic discovery. This framework supports legal document clustering, summarization, and cross-referencing, for scalable, interpretable, and accurate retrieval for semi-structured data while advancing computational law and AI.
Authors: Albert Gong, Kamil\.e Stankevi\v{c}i\=ut\.e, Chao Wan, Anmol Kabra, Raphael Thesmar, Johann Lee, Julius Klenke, Carla P. Gomes, Kilian Q. Weinberger
Abstract: High-quality benchmarks are essential for evaluating reasoning and retrieval capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, curating datasets for this purpose is not a permanent solution as they are prone to data leakage and inflated performance results. To address these challenges, we propose PhantomWiki: a pipeline to generate unique, factually consistent document corpora with diverse question-answer pairs. Unlike prior work, PhantomWiki is neither a fixed dataset, nor is it based on any existing data. Instead, a new PhantomWiki instance is generated on demand for each evaluation. We vary the question difficulty and corpus size to disentangle reasoning and retrieval capabilities respectively, and find that PhantomWiki datasets are surprisingly challenging for frontier LLMs. Thus, we contribute a scalable and data leakage-resistant framework for disentangled evaluation of reasoning, retrieval, and tool-use abilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/kilian-group/phantom-wiki.
Authors: Arnav Kumar Jain, Gonzalo Gonzalez-Pumariega, Wayne Chen, Alexander M Rush, Wenting Zhao, Sanjiban Choudhury
Abstract: We address the problem of code generation from multi-turn execution feedback. Existing methods either generate code without feedback or use complex, hierarchical reinforcement learning to optimize multi-turn rewards. We propose a simple yet scalable approach, $\mu$Code, that solves multi-turn code generation using only single-step rewards. Our key insight is that code generation is a one-step recoverable MDP, where the correct code can be recovered from any intermediate code state in a single turn. $\mu$Code iteratively trains both a generator to provide code solutions conditioned on multi-turn execution feedback and a verifier to score the newly generated code. Experimental evaluations show that our approach achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines. We provide analysis of the design choices of the reward models and policy, and show the efficacy of $\mu$Code at utilizing the execution feedback. Our code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/muCode.
Authors: Lujie Yang, H. J. Terry Suh, Tong Zhao, Bernhard Paus Graesdal, Tarik Kelestemur, Jiuguang Wang, Tao Pang, Russ Tedrake
Abstract: We present a low-cost data generation pipeline that integrates physics-based simulation, human demonstrations, and model-based planning to efficiently generate large-scale, high-quality datasets for contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. Starting with a small number of embodiment-flexible human demonstrations collected in a virtual reality simulation environment, the pipeline refines these demonstrations using optimization-based kinematic retargeting and trajectory optimization to adapt them across various robot embodiments and physical parameters. This process yields a diverse, physically consistent dataset that enables cross-embodiment data transfer, and offers the potential to reuse legacy datasets collected under different hardware configurations or physical parameters. We validate the pipeline's effectiveness by training diffusion policies from the generated datasets for challenging contact-rich manipulation tasks across multiple robot embodiments, including a floating Allegro hand and bimanual robot arms. The trained policies are deployed zero-shot on hardware for bimanual iiwa arms, achieving high success rates with minimal human input. Project website: https://lujieyang.github.io/physicsgen/.
Authors: Susmit Agrawal, Deepika Vemuri, Sri Siddarth Chakaravarthy P, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian
Abstract: Concept-based methods have emerged as a promising direction to develop interpretable neural networks in standard supervised settings. However, most works that study them in incremental settings assume either a static concept set across all experiences or assume that each experience relies on a distinct set of concepts. In this work, we study concept-based models in a more realistic, dynamic setting where new classes may rely on older concepts in addition to introducing new concepts themselves. We show that concepts and classes form a complex web of relationships, which is susceptible to degradation and needs to be preserved and augmented across experiences. We introduce new metrics to show that existing concept-based models cannot preserve these relationships even when trained using methods to prevent catastrophic forgetting, since they cannot handle forgetting at concept, class, and concept-class relationship levels simultaneously. To address these issues, we propose a novel method - MuCIL - that uses multimodal concepts to perform classification without increasing the number of trainable parameters across experiences. The multimodal concepts are aligned to concepts provided in natural language, making them interpretable by design. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art classification performance compared to other concept-based models, achieving over 2$\times$ the classification performance in some cases. We also study the ability of our model to perform interventions on concepts, and show that it can localize visual concepts in input images, providing post-hoc interpretations.
Authors: Toru Lin, Kartik Sachdev, Linxi Fan, Jitendra Malik, Yuke Zhu
Abstract: Reinforcement learning has delivered promising results in achieving human- or even superhuman-level capabilities across diverse problem domains, but success in dexterous robot manipulation remains limited. This work investigates the key challenges in applying reinforcement learning to solve a collection of contact-rich manipulation tasks on a humanoid embodiment. We introduce novel techniques to overcome the identified challenges with empirical validation. Our main contributions include an automated real-to-sim tuning module that brings the simulated environment closer to the real world, a generalized reward design scheme that simplifies reward engineering for long-horizon contact-rich manipulation tasks, a divide-and-conquer distillation process that improves the sample efficiency of hard-exploration problems while maintaining sim-to-real performance, and a mixture of sparse and dense object representations to bridge the sim-to-real perception gap. We show promising results on three humanoid dexterous manipulation tasks, with ablation studies on each technique. Our work presents a successful approach to learning humanoid dexterous manipulation using sim-to-real reinforcement learning, achieving robust generalization and high performance without the need for human demonstration.
Authors: Usef Faghihi, Amir Saki
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new causal methodology that accounts for the rarity and frequency of events in observational studies based on their relevance to the underlying problem. Specifically, we propose a direct causal effect metric called the Probabilistic vAriational Causal Effect (PACE) and its variations adhering to certain postulates applicable to both non-binary and binary treatments. The PACE metric is derived by integrating the concept of total variation, representing the purely causal component, with interventions on the treatment value, combined with the probabilities of hypothetical transitioning between treatment levels. PACE features a parameter $d$, where lower values of $d$ correspond to scenarios emphasizing rare treatment values, while higher values of $d$ focus on situations where the causal impact of more frequent treatment levels is more relevant. Thus, instead of a single causal effect value, we provide a causal effect function of the degree $d$. Additionally, we introduce positive and negative PACE to measure the respective positive and negative causal changes in the outcome as exposure values shift. We also consider normalized versions of PACE, referred to MEAN PACE. Furthermore, we provide an identifiability criterion for PACE to handle counterfactual challenges in observational studies, and we define several generalizations of our methodology. Lastly, we compare our framework with other well-known causal frameworks through the analysis of various examples.
Authors: Gianmarco Mengaldo
Abstract: The scientific method is the cornerstone of human progress across all branches of the natural and applied sciences, from understanding the human body to explaining how the universe works. The scientific method is based on identifying systematic rules or principles that describe the phenomenon of interest in a reproducible way that can be validated through experimental evidence. In the era of generative artificial intelligence, there are discussions on how AI systems may discover new knowledge. We argue that human complex reasoning for scientific discovery remains of vital importance, at least before the advent of artificial general intelligence. Yet, AI can be leveraged for scientific discovery via explainable AI. More specifically, knowing the `principles' the AI systems used to make decisions can be a point of contact with domain experts and scientists, that can lead to divergent or convergent views on a given scientific problem. Divergent views may spark further scientific investigations leading to interpretability-guided explanations (IGEs), and possibly to new scientific knowledge. We define this field as Explainable AI for Science, where domain experts -- potentially assisted by generative AI -- formulate scientific hypotheses and explanations based on the interpretability of a predictive AI system.
Authors: Jun-Yan He, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Chenyang Li, Jingdong Sun, Qi He, Wangmeng Xiang, Hanyuan Chen, Jin-Peng Lan, Xianhui Lin, Kang Zhu, Bin Luo, Yifeng Geng, Xuansong Xie, Alexander G. Hauptmann
Abstract: MetaDesigner introduces a transformative framework for artistic typography synthesis, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and grounded in a user-centric design paradigm. Its foundation is a multi-agent system comprising the Pipeline, Glyph, and Texture agents, which collectively orchestrate the creation of customizable WordArt, ranging from semantic enhancements to intricate textural elements. A central feedback mechanism leverages insights from both multimodal models and user evaluations, enabling iterative refinement of design parameters. Through this iterative process, MetaDesigner dynamically adjusts hyperparameters to align with user-defined stylistic and thematic preferences, consistently delivering WordArt that excels in visual quality and contextual resonance. Empirical evaluations underscore the system's versatility and effectiveness across diverse WordArt applications, yielding outputs that are both aesthetically compelling and context-sensitive.
Authors: Anton Xue, Avishree Khare, Rajeev Alur, Surbhi Goel, Eric Wong
Abstract: We study how to subvert large language models (LLMs) from following prompt-specified rules. We first formalize rule-following as inference in propositional Horn logic, a mathematical system in which rules have the form "if $P$ and $Q$, then $R$" for some propositions $P$, $Q$, and $R$. Next, we prove that although small transformers can faithfully follow such rules, maliciously crafted prompts can still mislead both theoretical constructions and models learned from data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that popular attack algorithms on LLMs find adversarial prompts and induce attention patterns that align with our theory. Our novel logic-based framework provides a foundation for studying LLMs in rule-based settings, enabling a formal analysis of tasks like logical reasoning and jailbreak attacks.
Authors: Jin Peng Zhou, Christian K. Belardi, Ruihan Wu, Travis Zhang, Carla P. Gomes, Wen Sun, Kilian Q. Weinberger
Abstract: Developing prompt-based methods with Large Language Models (LLMs) requires making numerous decisions, which give rise to a combinatorial search problem over hyper-parameters. This exhaustive evaluation can be time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we propose an $\textit{adaptive}$ approach to explore this space. We are exploiting the fact that often only few samples are needed to identify clearly superior or inferior settings, and that many evaluation tests are highly correlated. We lean on multi-armed bandits to sequentially identify the next (method, validation sample)-pair to evaluate and utilize low-rank matrix factorization to fill in missing evaluations. We carefully assess the efficacy of our approach on several competitive benchmark problems and show that it can identify the top-performing method using only 5-15% of the typical resources -- resulting in 85-95% LLM cost savings. Our code is available at https://github.com/kilian-group/banditeval.
Authors: Gaurav Sahu, Abhay Puri, Juan Rodriguez, Amirhossein Abaskohi, Mohammad Chegini, Alexandre Drouin, Perouz Taslakian, Valentina Zantedeschi, Alexandre Lacoste, David Vazquez, Nicolas Chapados, Christopher Pal, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba, Issam Hadj Laradji
Abstract: Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We introduce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics and can be accessed here: https://github.com/ServiceNow/insight-bench.
Authors: Shaoyu Wang, Kaiyue Zhao, Dongliang Wei, Przemys{\l}aw Andrzej Wa{\l}\k{e}ga, Dingmin Wang, Hongming Cai, Pan Hu
Abstract: DatalogMTL is a powerful rule-based language for temporal reasoning. Due to its high expressive power and flexible modeling capabilities, it is suitable for a wide range of applications, including tasks from industrial and financial sectors. However, due to its high computational complexity, practical reasoning in DatalogMTL is highly challenging. To address this difficulty, we introduce a new reasoning method for DatalogMTL which exploits the magic sets technique -- a rewriting approach developed for (non-temporal) Datalog to simulate top-down evaluation with bottom-up reasoning. We have implemented this approach and evaluated it on publicly available benchmarks, showing that the proposed approach significantly and consistently outperformed state-of-the-art reasoning techniques.
Authors: Yu-Han Huang, Argyrios Gerogiannis, Subhonmesh Bose, Venugopal V. Veeravalli
Abstract: Conventional Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms are designed for stationary environments, where the reward distributions associated with the arms do not change with time. In many applications, however, the environment is more accurately modeled as being nonstationary. In this work, piecewise stationary MAB (PS-MAB) environments are investigated, in which the reward distributions associated with a subset of the arms change at some change-points and remain stationary between change-points. Our focus is on the asymptotic analysis of PS-MABs, for which practical algorithms based on change detection (CD) have been previously proposed. Our goal is to modularize the design and analysis of such CD-based Bandit (CDB) procedures. To this end, we identify the requirements for stationary bandit algorithms and change detectors in a CDB procedure that are needed for the modularization. We assume that the rewards are sub-Gaussian. Under this assumption and a condition on the separation of the change-points, we show that the analysis of CDB procedures can indeed be modularized, so that regret bounds can be obtained in a unified manner for various combinations of change detectors and bandit algorithms. Through this analysis, we develop new modular CDB procedures that are order-optimal. We compare the performance of our modular CDB procedures with various other methods in simulations.
Authors: Aobo Kong, Wentao Ma, Shiwan Zhao, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Ke Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Fei Huang
Abstract: Social agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can simulate human social behaviors but fall short in handling complex social dialogues. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various agent tasks. However, standard DPO focuses solely on individual turns, which limits its effectiveness in multi-turn social interactions. Several DPO-based multi-turn alignment methods with session-level data have shown potential in addressing this problem.While these methods consider multiple turns across entire sessions, they are often overly coarse-grained, introducing training noise, and lack robust theoretical support. To resolve these limitations, we propose Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization (SDPO), which dynamically select key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior. SDPO minimizes training noise and is grounded in a rigorous theoretical framework. Evaluations on the SOTOPIA benchmark demonstrate that SDPO-tuned agents consistently outperform both existing DPO-based methods and proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o, underscoring SDPO's potential to advance the social intelligence of LLM-based agents. We release our code and data at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/SDPO.
URLs: https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/SDPO.
Authors: Xinxin You, Xien Liu, Qixin Sun, Huan Zhang, Kaiyin Zhou, Shaohui Liu, GuoPing Hu, ShiJin Wang, Si Liu, Ji Wu
Abstract: Recent methodologies utilizing synthetic datasets have aimed to address inconsistent hallucinations in large language models (LLMs); however,these approaches are primarily tailored to specific tasks, limiting their generalizability. Inspired by the strong performance of code-trained models in logic-intensive domains, we propose a novel framework that leverages event-based text to generate corresponding code and employs cyclic training to transfer the logical consistency of code to natural language effectively. Our method significantly reduces inconsistent hallucinations across three leading LLMs and two categories of natural language tasks while maintaining overall performance. This framework effectively alleviates hallucinations without necessitating adaptation to downstream tasks, demonstrating generality and providing new perspectives to tackle the challenge of inconsistent hallucinations.
Authors: Zenan Li, Zhaoyu Li, Wen Tang, Xian Zhang, Yuan Yao, Xujie Si, Fan Yang, Kaiyu Yang, Xiaoxing Ma
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can prove mathematical theorems formally by generating proof steps (\textit{a.k.a.} tactics) within a proof system. However, the space of possible tactics is vast and complex, while the available training data for formal proofs is limited, posing a significant challenge to LLM-based tactic generation. To address this, we introduce a neuro-symbolic tactic generator that synergizes the mathematical intuition learned by LLMs with domain-specific insights encoded by symbolic methods. The key aspect of this integration is identifying which parts of mathematical reasoning are best suited to LLMs and which to symbolic methods. While the high-level idea of neuro-symbolic integration is broadly applicable to various mathematical problems, in this paper, we focus specifically on Olympiad inequalities (Figure~1). We analyze how humans solve these problems and distill the techniques into two types of tactics: (1) scaling, handled by symbolic methods, and (2) rewriting, handled by LLMs. In addition, we combine symbolic tools with LLMs to prune and rank the proof goals for efficient proof search. We evaluate our framework on 161 challenging inequalities from multiple mathematics competitions, achieving state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforming existing LLM and symbolic approaches without requiring additional training data.
Authors: Daphne Cornelisse, Aarav Pandya, Kevin Joseph, Joseph Su\'arez, Eugene Vinitsky
Abstract: Simulation agents are essential for designing and testing systems that interact with humans, such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). These agents serve various purposes, from benchmarking AV performance to stress-testing system limits, but all applications share one key requirement: reliability. To enable systematic experimentation, a simulation agent must behave as intended. It should minimize actions that may lead to undesired outcomes, such as collisions, which can distort the signal-to-noise ratio in analyses. As a foundation for reliable sim agents, we propose scaling self-play to thousands of scenarios on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset under semi-realistic limits on human perception and control. Training from scratch on a single GPU, our agents nearly solve the full training set within a day. They generalize effectively to unseen test scenes, achieving a 99.8% goal completion rate with less than 0.8% combined collision and off-road incidents across 10,000 held-out scenarios. Beyond in-distribution generalization, our agents show partial robustness to out-of-distribution scenes and can be fine-tuned in minutes to reach near-perfect performance in those cases. We open-source the pre-trained agents and integrate them with a batched multi-agent simulator. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/reliable-sim-agents.
Authors: Yifu Ding, Wentao Jiang, Shunyu Liu, Yongcheng Jing, Jinyang Guo, Yingjie Wang, Jing Zhang, Zengmao Wang, Ziwei Liu, Bo Du, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: Tree of Thoughts (ToT) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning by structuring problem-solving as a spanning tree. However, recent methods focus on search accuracy while overlooking computational efficiency. The challenges of accelerating the ToT lie in the frequent switching of reasoning focus, and the redundant exploration of suboptimal solutions. To alleviate this dilemma, we propose Dynamic Parallel Tree Search (DPTS), a novel parallelism framework that aims to dynamically optimize the reasoning path in inference. It includes the Parallelism Streamline in the generation phase to build up a flexible and adaptive parallelism with arbitrary paths by fine-grained cache management and alignment. Meanwhile, the Search and Transition Mechanism filters potential candidates to dynamically maintain the reasoning focus on more possible solutions and have less redundancy. Experiments on Qwen-2.5 and Llama-3 with Math500 and GSM8K datasets show that DPTS significantly improves efficiency by 2-4x on average while maintaining or even surpassing existing reasoning algorithms in accuracy, making ToT-based reasoning more scalable and computationally efficient.
Authors: Po-Wei Huang, Pei-Chiun Peng, Hung Guei, Ti-Rong Wu
Abstract: Planning with options -- a sequence of primitive actions -- has been shown effective in reinforcement learning within complex environments. Previous studies have focused on planning with predefined options or learned options through expert demonstration data. Inspired by MuZero, which learns superhuman heuristics without any human knowledge, we propose a novel approach, named OptionZero. OptionZero incorporates an option network into MuZero, providing autonomous discovery of options through self-play games. Furthermore, we modify the dynamics network to provide environment transitions when using options, allowing searching deeper under the same simulation constraints. Empirical experiments conducted in 26 Atari games demonstrate that OptionZero outperforms MuZero, achieving a 131.58% improvement in mean human-normalized score. Our behavior analysis shows that OptionZero not only learns options but also acquires strategic skills tailored to different game characteristics. Our findings show promising directions for discovering and using options in planning. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/optionzero.
Authors: Suozhi Huang, Peiyang Song, Robert Joseph George, Anima Anandkumar
Abstract: Mathematical reasoning remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to hallucinations. When combined with formal proof assistants like Lean, these hallucinations can be eliminated through rigorous verification, making theorem proving reliable. However, even with formal verification, LLMs still struggle with long proofs and complex mathematical formalizations. While Lean with LLMs offers valuable assistance with retrieving lemmas, generating tactics, or even complete proofs, it lacks a crucial capability: providing a sense of proof progress. This limitation particularly impacts the overall development efficiency in large formalization projects. We introduce LeanProgress, a method that predicts the progress in the proof. Training and evaluating our models made on a large corpus of Lean proofs from Lean Workbook Plus and Mathlib4 and how many steps remain to complete it, we employ data preprocessing and balancing techniques to handle the skewed distribution of proof lengths. Our experiments show that LeanProgress achieves an overall prediction accuracy of 75.1\% in predicting the amount of progress and, hence, the remaining number of steps. When integrated into a best-first search framework using Reprover, our method shows a 3.8\% improvement on Mathlib4 compared to baseline performances of 41.2\%, particularly for longer proofs. These results demonstrate how proof progress prediction can enhance both automated and interactive theorem proving, enabling users to make more informed decisions about proof strategies.
Authors: Lei Li, Sen Jia, Jianhao Wang, Zhaochong An, Jiaang Li, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Serge Belongie
Abstract: Advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have improved human motion understanding. However, these models remain constrained by their "instruct-only" nature, lacking interactivity and adaptability for diverse analytical perspectives. To address these challenges, we introduce ChatMotion, a multimodal multi-agent framework for human motion analysis. ChatMotion dynamically interprets user intent, decomposes complex tasks into meta-tasks, and activates specialized function modules for motion comprehension. It integrates multiple specialized modules, such as the MotionCore, to analyze human motion from various perspectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate ChatMotion's precision, adaptability, and user engagement for human motion understanding.
Authors: William Solow, Sandhya Saisubramanian, Alan Fern
Abstract: We introduce WOFOSTGym, a novel crop simulation environment designed to train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to optimize agromanagement decisions for annual and perennial crops in single and multi-farm settings. Effective crop management requires optimizing yield and economic returns while minimizing environmental impact, a complex sequential decision-making problem well suited for RL. However, the lack of simulators for perennial crops in multi-farm contexts has hindered RL applications in this domain. Existing crop simulators also do not support multiple annual crops. WOFOSTGym addresses these gaps by supporting 23 annual crops and two perennial crops, enabling RL agents to learn diverse agromanagement strategies in multi-year, multi-crop, and multi-farm settings. Our simulator offers a suite of challenging tasks for learning under partial observability, non-Markovian dynamics, and delayed feedback. WOFOSTGym's standard RL interface allows researchers without agricultural expertise to explore a wide range of agromanagement problems. Our experiments demonstrate the learned behaviors across various crop varieties and soil types, highlighting WOFOSTGym's potential for advancing RL-driven decision support in agriculture.
Authors: Yang Li, Di Wang, Jos\'e M. F. Moura
Abstract: Forecasting graph-based, time-dependent data has broad practical applications but presents challenges. Effective models must capture both spatial and temporal dependencies in the data, while also incorporating auxiliary information to enhance prediction accuracy. In this paper, we identify limitations in current state-of-the-art models regarding temporal dependency handling. To overcome this, we introduce GSA-Forecaster, a new deep learning model designed for forecasting in graph-based, time-dependent contexts. GSA-Forecaster utilizes graph sequence attention, a new attention mechanism proposed in this paper, to effectively manage temporal dependencies. GSA-Forecaster integrates the data's graph structure directly into its architecture, addressing spatial dependencies. Additionally, it incorporates auxiliary information to refine its predictions further. We validate its performance using real-world graph-based, time-dependent datasets, where it demonstrates superior effectiveness compared to existing state-of-the-art models.
Authors: Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Rodrigo Agerri
Abstract: The large majority of the research performed on stance detection has been focused on developing more or less sophisticated text classification systems, even when many benchmarks are based on social network data such as Twitter. This paper aims to take on the stance detection task by placing the emphasis not so much on the text itself but on the interaction data available on social networks. More specifically, we propose a new method to leverage social information such as friends and retweets by generating Relational Embeddings, namely, dense vector representations of interaction pairs. Our experiments on seven publicly available datasets and four different languages (Basque, Catalan, Italian, and Spanish) show that combining our relational embeddings with discriminative textual methods helps to substantially improve performance, obtaining state-of-the-art results for six out of seven evaluation settings, outperforming strong baselines based on Large Language Models, or other popular interaction-based approaches such as DeepWalk or node2vec.
Authors: Sylvain Bouveret, Hugo Gilbert, J\'er\^ome Lang, Guillaume M\'erou\'e
Abstract: When allocating indivisible items to agents, it is known that the only strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy a set of rather mild conditions are constrained serial dictatorships: given a fixed order over agents, at each step the designated agent chooses a given number of items (depending on her position in the sequence). Agents who come earlier in the sequence have a larger choice of items; however, this advantage can be compensated by a higher number of items received by those who come later. How to balance priority in the sequence and number of items received is a nontrivial question. We use a previous model, parameterized by a mapping from ranks to scores, a social welfare functional, and a distribution over preference profiles. For several meaningful choices of parameters, we show that the optimal sequence can be computed exactly in polynomial time or approximated using sampling. Our results hold for several probabilistic models on preference profiles, with an emphasis on the Plackett-Luce model. We conclude with experimental results showing how the optimal sequence is impacted by various parameters.
Authors: Xingyu Qu, Samuel Horvath
Abstract: Model merging offers an efficient way to combine pre-trained neural networks but often suffers from inconsistent performance, especially when merging models with different initializations. We identify the ``vanishing feature'' phenomenon, where input-induced features diminish during propagation through the merged model, degrading performance. Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we reveal that this phenomenon underpins challenges like variance collapse and explains techniques like permutation-based merging, post-merging normalization, etc. We show that existing normalization strategies can be enhanced by precisely targeting the vanishing feature issue. Leveraging these insights, we propose the ``Preserve-First Merging'' (PFM) strategy, which focuses on preserving early-layer features, enabling the merged models, for the first time, to outperform the original models in advanced settings without post-training. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the vanishing feature phenomenon extends to other contexts, such as model pruning. Applying post-pruning normalization to mitigate the issue significantly improves one-shot pruning performance at high sparsity, offering a simple and effective post-pruning solution. The code is available at https://github.com/XingyuQu/VF.
Authors: Benedikt Alkin, Andreas F\"urst, Simon Schmid, Lukas Gruber, Markus Holzleitner, Johannes Brandstetter
Abstract: Neural operators, serving as physics surrogate models, have recently gained increased interest. With ever increasing problem complexity, the natural question arises: what is an efficient way to scale neural operators to larger and more complex simulations - most importantly by taking into account different types of simulation datasets. This is of special interest since, akin to their numerical counterparts, different techniques are used across applications, even if the underlying dynamics of the systems are similar. Whereas the flexibility of transformers has enabled unified architectures across domains, neural operators mostly follow a problem specific design, where GNNs are commonly used for Lagrangian simulations and grid-based models predominate Eulerian simulations. We introduce Universal Physics Transformers (UPTs), an efficient and unified learning paradigm for a wide range of spatio-temporal problems. UPTs operate without grid- or particle-based latent structures, enabling flexibility and scalability across meshes and particles. UPTs efficiently propagate dynamics in the latent space, emphasized by inverse encoding and decoding techniques. Finally, UPTs allow for queries of the latent space representation at any point in space-time. We demonstrate diverse applicability and efficacy of UPTs in mesh-based fluid simulations, and steady-state Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes simulations, and Lagrangian-based dynamics.
Authors: Abhishek Dalvi, Vasant Honavar
Abstract: We introduce Hyperdimensional Graph Learner (HDGL), a novel method for node classification and link prediction in graphs. HDGL maps node features into a very high-dimensional space (\textit{hyperdimensional} or HD space for short) using the \emph{injectivity} property of node representations in a family of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and then uses HD operators such as \textit{bundling} and \textit{binding} to aggregate information from the local neighborhood of each node yielding latent node representations that can support both node classification and link prediction tasks. HDGL, unlike GNNs that rely on computationally expensive iterative optimization and hyperparameter tuning, requires only a single pass through the data set. We report results of experiments using widely used benchmark datasets which demonstrate that, on the node classification task, HDGL achieves accuracy that is competitive with that of the state-of-the-art GNN methods at substantially reduced computational cost; and on the link prediction task, HDGL matches the performance of DeepWalk and related methods, although it falls short of computationally demanding state-of-the-art GNNs.
Authors: Mohammad Rostami, Atik Faysal, Huaxia Wang, Avimanyu Sahoo
Abstract: Overfitting is a significant challenge in Few-Shot Learning (FSL), where models trained on small, variable datasets tend to memorize rather than generalize to unseen tasks. Regularization is crucial in FSL to prevent overfitting and enhance generalization performance. To address this issue, we introduce Meta-Task, a novel, method-agnostic framework that leverages both labeled and unlabeled data to enhance generalization through auxiliary tasks for regularization. Specifically, Meta-Task introduces a Task-Decoder, which is a simple example of the broader framework that refines hidden representations by reconstructing input images from embeddings, effectively mitigating overfitting. Our framework's method-agnostic design ensures its broad applicability across various FSL settings. We validate Meta-Task's effectiveness on standard benchmarks, including Mini-ImageNet, Tiered-ImageNet, and FC100, where it consistently improves existing state-of-the-art meta-learning techniques, demonstrating superior performance, faster convergence, reduced generalization error, and lower variance-all without extensive hyperparameter tuning. These results underline Meta-Task's practical applicability and efficiency in real-world, resource-constrained scenarios.
Authors: Fangqiang Ding, Yunzhou Zhu, Xiangyu Wen, Gaowen Liu, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
Abstract: Designing egocentric 3D hand pose estimation systems that can perform reliably in complex, real-world scenarios is crucial for downstream applications. Previous approaches using RGB or NIR imagery struggle in challenging conditions: RGB methods are susceptible to lighting variations and obstructions like handwear, while NIR techniques can be disrupted by sunlight or interference from other NIR-equipped devices. To address these limitations, we present ThermoHands, the first benchmark focused on thermal image-based egocentric 3D hand pose estimation, demonstrating the potential of thermal imaging to achieve robust performance under these conditions. The benchmark includes a multi-view and multi-spectral dataset collected from 28 subjects performing hand-object and hand-virtual interactions under diverse scenarios, accurately annotated with 3D hand poses through an automated process. We introduce a new baseline method, TherFormer, utilizing dual transformer modules for effective egocentric 3D hand pose estimation in thermal imagery. Our experimental results highlight TherFormer's leading performance and affirm thermal imaging's effectiveness in enabling robust 3D hand pose estimation in adverse conditions.
Authors: Dipika Jha, Ankit K. Bhagat, Raju Halder, Rajendra N. Paramanik, Chandra M. Kumar
Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive Decentraland parcels dataset, called IITP-VDLand, sourced from diverse platforms such as Decentraland, OpenSea, Etherscan, Google BigQuery, and various Social Media Platforms. Unlike existing datasets which have limited attributes and records, IITP-VDLand offers a rich array of attributes, encompassing parcel characteristics, trading history, past activities, transactions, and social media interactions. Alongside, we introduce a key attribute in the dataset, namely Rarity score, which measures the uniqueness of each parcel within the virtual world. Addressing the significant challenge posed by the dispersed nature of this data across various sources, we employ a systematic approach, utilizing both available APIs and custom scripts, to gather it. Subsequently, we meticulously curate and organize the information into four distinct fragments: (1) Characteristics, (2) OpenSea Trading History, (3) Ethereum Activity Transactions, and (4) Social Media. We envisage that this dataset would serve as a robust resource for training machine- and deep-learning models specifically designed to address real-world challenges within the domain of Decentraland parcels. The performance benchmarking of more than 20 state-of-the-art price prediction models on our dataset yields promising results, achieving a maximum R2 score of 0.8251 and an accuracy of 74.23% in case of Extra Trees Regressor and Classifier. The key findings reveal that the ensemble models perform better than both deep learning and linear models for our dataset. We observe a significant impact of coordinates, geographical proximity, rarity score, and few other economic indicators on the prediction of parcel prices.
Authors: Tien-Hong Lo, Fu-An Chao, Tzu-I Wu, Yao-Ting Sung, Berlin Chen
Abstract: Automated speaking assessment (ASA) typically involves automatic speech recognition (ASR) and hand-crafted feature extraction from the ASR transcript of a learner's speech. Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown stellar performance compared to traditional methods. However, SSL-based ASA systems are faced with at least three data-related challenges: limited annotated data, uneven distribution of learner proficiency levels and non-uniform score intervals between different CEFR proficiency levels. To address these challenges, we explore the use of two novel modeling strategies: metric-based classification and loss reweighting, leveraging distinct SSL-based embedding features. Extensive experimental results on the ICNALE benchmark dataset suggest that our approach can outperform existing strong baselines by a sizable margin, achieving a significant improvement of more than 10% in CEFR prediction accuracy.
Authors: Guangyao Zhai, Evin P{\i}nar \"Ornek, Dave Zhenyu Chen, Ruotong Liao, Yan Di, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari, Benjamin Busam
Abstract: We present EchoScene, an interactive and controllable generative model that generates 3D indoor scenes on scene graphs. EchoScene leverages a dual-branch diffusion model that dynamically adapts to scene graphs. Existing methods struggle to handle scene graphs due to varying numbers of nodes, multiple edge combinations, and manipulator-induced node-edge operations. EchoScene overcomes this by associating each node with a denoising process and enables collaborative information exchange, enhancing controllable and consistent generation aware of global constraints. This is achieved through an information echo scheme in both shape and layout branches. At every denoising step, all processes share their denoising data with an information exchange unit that combines these updates using graph convolution. The scheme ensures that the denoising processes are influenced by a holistic understanding of the scene graph, facilitating the generation of globally coherent scenes. The resulting scenes can be manipulated during inference by editing the input scene graph and sampling the noise in the diffusion model. Extensive experiments validate our approach, which maintains scene controllability and surpasses previous methods in generation fidelity. Moreover, the generated scenes are of high quality and thus directly compatible with off-the-shelf texture generation. Code and trained models are open-sourced.
Authors: Siyuan Li, Xi Lin, Yaju Liu, Xiang Chen, Jianhua Li
Abstract: AI-generated content (AIGC) models, represented by large language models (LLM), have revolutionized content creation. High-speed next-generation communication technology is an ideal platform for providing powerful AIGC network services. At the same time, advanced AIGC techniques can also make future network services more intelligent, especially various online content generation services. However, the significant untrustworthiness concerns of current AIGC models, such as robustness, security, and fairness, greatly affect the credibility of intelligent network services, especially in ensuring secure AIGC services. This paper proposes TrustGAIN, a trustworthy AIGC framework that incorporates robust, secure, and fair network services. We first discuss the robustness to adversarial attacks faced by AIGC models in network systems and the corresponding protection issues. Subsequently, we emphasize the importance of avoiding unsafe and illegal services and ensuring the fairness of the AIGC network services. Then as a case study, we propose a novel sentiment analysis-based detection method to guide the robust detection of unsafe content in network services. We conduct our experiments on fake news, malicious code, and unsafe review datasets to represent LLM application scenarios. Our results indicate that TrustGAIN is an exploration of future networks that can support trustworthy AIGC network services.
Authors: Sayan Bandyapadhyay, Eden Chlamt\'a\v{c}, Zachary Friggstad, Mahya Jamshidian, Yury Makarychev, Ali Vakilian
Abstract: In this work, we study pairwise fair clustering with $\ell \ge 2$ groups, where for every cluster $C$ and every group $i \in [\ell]$, the number of points in $C$ from group $i$ must be at most $t$ times the number of points in $C$ from any other group $j \in [\ell]$, for a given integer $t$. To the best of our knowledge, only bi-criteria approximation and exponential-time algorithms follow for this problem from the prior work on fair clustering problems when $\ell > 2$. In our work, focusing on the $\ell > 2$ case, we design the first polynomial-time $O(k^2\cdot \ell \cdot t)$-approximation for this problem with $k$-median cost that does not violate the fairness constraints. We complement our algorithmic result by providing hardness of approximation results, which show that our problem even when $\ell=2$ is almost as hard as the popular uniform capacitated $k$-median, for which no polynomial-time algorithm with an approximation factor of $o(\log k)$ is known.
Authors: Holli Sargeant, Ahmed Izzidien, Felix Steffek
Abstract: This paper addresses a critical gap in legal analytics by developing and applying a novel taxonomy for topic classification of summary judgment cases in the United Kingdom. Using a curated dataset of summary judgment cases, we use the Large Language Model Claude 3 Opus to explore functional topics and trends. We find that Claude 3 Opus correctly classified the topic with an accuracy of 87.13% and an F1 score of 0.87. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in the application of summary judgments across various legal domains. As case law in the United Kingdom is not originally labelled with keywords or a topic filtering option, the findings not only refine our understanding of the thematic underpinnings of summary judgments but also illustrate the potential of combining traditional and AI-driven approaches in legal classification. Therefore, this paper provides a new and general taxonomy for UK law. The implications of this work serve as a foundation for further research and policy discussions in the field of judicial administration and computational legal research methodologies.
Authors: Yuheng Chen, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) store extensive factual knowledge, but the mechanisms behind how they store and express this knowledge remain unclear. The Knowledge Neuron (KN) thesis is a prominent theory for explaining these mechanisms. This theory is based on the Knowledge Localization (KL) assumption, which suggests that a fact can be localized to a few knowledge storage units, namely knowledge neurons. However, this assumption has two limitations: first, it may be too rigid regarding knowledge storage, and second, it neglects the role of the attention module in knowledge expression. In this paper, we first re-examine the KL assumption and demonstrate that its limitations do indeed exist. To address these, we then present two new findings, each targeting one of the limitations: one focusing on knowledge storage and the other on knowledge expression. We summarize these findings as \textbf{Query Localization} (QL) assumption and argue that the KL assumption can be viewed as a simplification of the QL assumption. Based on QL assumption, we further propose the Consistency-Aware KN modification method, which improves the performance of knowledge modification, further validating our new assumption. We conduct 39 sets of experiments, along with additional visualization experiments, to rigorously confirm our conclusions. Code is available at https://github.com/heng840/KnowledgeLocalization.
Authors: Yan Yang, Bin Gao, Ya-xiang Yuan
Abstract: Bilevel reinforcement learning (RL), which features intertwined two-level problems, has attracted growing interest recently. The inherent non-convexity of the lower-level RL problem is, however, to be an impediment to developing bilevel optimization methods. By employing the fixed point equation associated with the regularized RL, we characterize the hyper-gradient via fully first-order information, thus circumventing the assumption of lower-level convexity. This, remarkably, distinguishes our development of hyper-gradient from the general AID-based bilevel frameworks since we take advantage of the specific structure of RL problems. Moreover, we design both model-based and model-free bilevel reinforcement learning algorithms, facilitated by access to the fully first-order hyper-gradient. Both algorithms enjoy the convergence rate $O(\epsilon^{-1})$. To extend the applicability, a stochastic version of the model-free algorithm is proposed, along with results on its iteration and sample complexity. In addition, numerical experiments demonstrate that the hyper-gradient indeed serves as an integration of exploitation and exploration.
Authors: Aastha Acharya, Caleb Lee, Marissa D'Alonzo, Jared Shamwell, Nisar R. Ahmed, Rebecca Russell
Abstract: Deep learning offers promising new ways to accurately model aleatoric uncertainty in robotic state estimation systems, particularly when the uncertainty distributions do not conform to traditional assumptions of being fixed and Gaussian. In this study, we formulate and evaluate three fundamental deep learning approaches for conditional probability density modeling to quantify non-Gaussian aleatoric uncertainty: parametric, discretized, and generative modeling. We systematically compare the respective strengths and weaknesses of these three methods on simulated non-Gaussian densities as well as on real-world terrain-relative navigation data. Our results show that these deep learning methods can accurately capture complex uncertainty patterns, highlighting their potential for improving the reliability and robustness of estimation systems.
Authors: Xiaojin Zhang, Yahao Pang, Yan Kang, Wei Chen, Lixin Fan, Hai Jin, Qiang Yang
Abstract: Individuals and businesses have been significantly benefited by Large Language Models (LLMs) including PaLM, Gemini and ChatGPT in various ways. For example, LLMs enhance productivity, reduce costs, and enable us to focus on more valuable tasks. Furthermore, LLMs possess the capacity to sift through extensive datasets, uncover underlying patterns, and furnish critical insights that propel the frontiers of technology and science. However, LLMs also pose privacy concerns. Users' interactions with LLMs may expose their sensitive personal or company information. A lack of robust privacy safeguards and legal frameworks could permit the unwarranted intrusion or improper handling of individual data, thereby risking infringements of privacy and the theft of personal identities. To ensure privacy, it is essential to minimize the dependency between shared prompts and private information. Various randomization approaches have been proposed to protect prompts' privacy, but they may incur utility loss compared to unprotected LLMs prompting. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate the balance between the risk of privacy leakage and loss of utility when conducting effective protection mechanisms. The current study develops a framework for inferring privacy-protected Large Language Models (LLMs) and lays down a solid theoretical basis for examining the interplay between privacy preservation and utility. The core insight is encapsulated within a theorem that is called as the NFL (abbreviation of the word No-Free-Lunch) Theorem.
Authors: Yongting Zhang, Lu Chen, Guodong Zheng, Yifeng Gao, Rui Zheng, Jinlan Fu, Zhenfei Yin, Senjie Jin, Yu Qiao, Xuanjing Huang, Feng Zhao, Tao Gui, Jing Shao
Abstract: The emergence of Vision Language Models (VLMs) has brought unprecedented advances in understanding multimodal information. The combination of textual and visual semantics in VLMs is highly complex and diverse, making the safety alignment of these models challenging. Furthermore, due to the limited study on the safety alignment of VLMs, there is a lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets. To address these limitations, we propose a Safety Preference Alignment dataset for Vision Language Models named SPA-VL. In terms of breadth, SPA-VL covers 6 harmfulness domains, 13 categories, and 53 subcategories, and contains 100,788 samples of the quadruple (question, image, chosen response, rejected response). In terms of depth, the responses are collected from 12 open-source (e.g., QwenVL) and closed-source (e.g., Gemini) VLMs to ensure diversity. The construction of preference data is fully automated, and the experimental results indicate that models trained with alignment techniques on the SPA-VL dataset exhibit substantial improvements in harmlessness and helpfulness while maintaining core capabilities. SPA-VL, as a large-scale, high-quality, and diverse dataset, represents a significant milestone in ensuring that VLMs achieve both harmlessness and helpfulness.
Authors: Junhan Kim, Ho-young Kim, Eulrang Cho, Chungman Lee, Joonyoung Kim, Yongkweon Jeon
Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a promising solution for deploying large language models (LLMs) on resource-constrained devices. Early methods developed for smaller networks like ResNet rely on gradient-based optimization, which becomes impractical for hyper-scale LLMs with billions of parameters. While recently proposed backpropagation-free or transformation-based methods alleviate this issue, their performance remains limited by either a lack of inter-layer dependency consideration or the use of naive nearest-rounding-based integer weight assignment to save the heavy computational cost of weight optimization. We thus introduce a novel backpropagation-free PTQ algorithm that optimizes integer weights by considering inter-layer dependencies. The key innovation is the development of attention-aware Hessian matrices that capture inter-layer interactions within the attention module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms existing weight quantization methods but also shows good synergy with conventional methods to suppress activation outliers, leading to state-of-the-art weight-activation quantization performance.
Authors: Praneeth Vadlapati
Abstract: Up-to-date and reliable language models are consistently sought after and are essential in various applications. Typically, models are trained on a fixed dataset and then deployed globally. However, the knowledge of the models becomes outdated. Enabling automatic updation of AI knowledge using web data involves significant concerns regarding the model's safety and quality due to a threat from unsafe and undesirable text across the web. The purity of new data was essential for updating knowledge of language models to maintain their reliability. This paper proposes AutoPureData, a system that automatically collects and purifies web data. The system loaded a sample of web data. Utilizing existing trusted AI models, it successfully eliminated unsafe text with an accuracy of 97% and undesirable text with an accuracy of 86%, demonstrating the system's effectiveness in purifying the data. The system ensures that only meaningful and safe text can be used to update LLM knowledge. The pure text was then optimized and stored in a vector database for future querying. It was found that LLM can fetch new data from the vector DB. The LLM writes the RAG query in English, even if the user's query is in another language, proving that the system can perform cross-lingual retrieval. This paper proposes a method to maintain the accuracy and relevance of up-to-date language models by ensuring that only purified data was used to update LLM knowledge. This work contributes to updating knowledge of chatbots using meaningful and safe text, enhancing their utility across various industries, and potentially reducing the risks associated with outputs caused by unsafe or impure data. Code is available at github.com/Pro-GenAI/AutoPureData.
Authors: Jinsheng Huang, Liang Chen, Taian Guo, Fu Zeng, Yusheng Zhao, Bohan Wu, Ye Yuan, Haozhe Zhao, Zhihui Guo, Yichi Zhang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Luchen Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Zhang
Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, often assessed through multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that include an image, a question, and several options. However, many benchmarks used for such evaluations suffer from systematic biases. Remarkably, Large Language Models (LLMs) without any visual perception capabilities achieve non-trivial performance, undermining the credibility of these evaluations. To address this issue while maintaining the efficiency of MCQ evaluations, we propose MMEvalPro, a benchmark designed to avoid Type-I errors through a trilogy evaluation pipeline and more rigorous metrics. For each original question from existing benchmarks, human annotators augment it by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. MMEvalPro comprises $2,138$ question triplets, totaling $6,414$ distinct questions. Two-thirds of these questions are manually labeled by human experts, while the rest are sourced from existing benchmarks (MMMU, ScienceQA, and MathVista). Compared with the existing benchmarks, our experiments with the latest LLMs and LMMs demonstrate that MMEvalPro is more challenging (the best LMM lags behind human performance by $31.73\%$, compared to an average gap of $8.03\%$ in previous benchmarks) and more trustworthy (the best LLM trails the best LMM by $23.09\%$, whereas the gap for previous benchmarks is just $14.64\%$). Our in-depth analysis explains the reason for the large performance gap and justifies the trustworthiness of evaluation, underscoring its significant potential for advancing future research.
Authors: Yu-Guan Hsieh, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Shih-Ying Yeh, Louis B\'ethune, Hadi Pour Ansari, Pavan Kumar Anasosalu Vasu, Chun-Liang Li, Ranjay Krishna, Oncel Tuzel, Marco Cuturi
Abstract: Humans describe complex scenes with compositionality, using simple text descriptions enriched with links and relationships. While vision-language research has aimed to develop models with compositional understanding capabilities, this is not reflected yet in existing datasets which, for the most part, still use plain text to describe images. In this work, we propose a new annotation strategy, graph-based captioning (GBC) that describes an image using a labeled graph structure, with nodes of various types. The nodes in GBC are created through a two-stage process: first, identifying and describing entity nodes; second, linking these nodes by highlighting \textit{compositions} and \textit{relations} among them. Since \textit{all} GBC nodes hold plain text descriptions, GBC retains the flexibility found in natural language, but can also encode hierarchical information in its edges. We demonstrate that GBC can be produced automatically, using off-the-shelf multimodal LLMs and object detection models, by building a new dataset GBC10M that gathers GBC annotations for about 10M images of the CC12M dataset. Through CLIP training on GBC10M, we show that leveraging GBC nodes' annotations -- particularly those in composition and relation nodes -- significantly boosts the model's performance across various benchmarks compared to when other annotations are used. To further explore the opportunities provided by GBC, we also investigate the use of GBC as middleware for text-to-image generation, and show the extra benefits of incorporating the graph structure in this task. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/apple/ml-gbc and https://huggingface.co/graph-based-captions.
URLs: https://github.com/apple/ml-gbc, https://huggingface.co/graph-based-captions.
Authors: Yuqi Zhou, Joseph Severino, Sanjana Vijayshankar, Juliette Ugirumurera, Jibo Sanyal
Abstract: Timely and effective load shedding in power systems is critical for maintaining supply-demand balance and preventing cascading blackouts. To eliminate load shedding bias against specific regions in the system, optimization-based methods are uniquely positioned to help balance between economic and fairness considerations. However, the resulting optimization problem involves complex constraints, which can be time-consuming to solve and thus cannot meet the real-time requirements of load shedding. To tackle this challenge, in this paper we present an efficient machine learning algorithm to enable millisecond-level computation for the optimization-based load shedding problem. Numerical studies on both a 3-bus toy example and a realistic RTS-GMLC system have demonstrated the validity and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for delivering fairness-aware and real-time load shedding decisions.
Authors: Yuhui Xu, Zhanming Jie, Hanze Dong, Lei Wang, Xudong Lu, Aojun Zhou, Amrita Saha, Caiming Xiong, Doyen Sahoo
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, achieving unprecedented performance across a variety of applications. However, their increased computational and memory demands present significant challenges, especially when handling long sequences. This paper focuses on the long-context scenario, addressing the inefficiencies in KV cache memory consumption during inference. Unlike existing approaches that optimize the memory based on the sequence length, we identify substantial redundancy in the channel dimension of the KV cache, as indicated by an uneven magnitude distribution and a low-rank structure in the attention weights. In response, we propose ThinK, a novel query-dependent KV cache pruning method designed to minimize attention weight loss while selectively pruning the least significant channels. Our approach not only maintains or enhances model accuracy but also achieves a reduction in KV cache memory costs by over 20% compared with vanilla KV cache eviction and quantization methods. For instance, ThinK integrated with KIVI can achieve a 2.8x reduction in peak memory usage while maintaining nearly the same quality, enabling up to a 5x increase in batch size when using a single GPU. Extensive evaluations on the LLaMA and Mistral models across various long-sequence datasets verified the efficiency of ThinK, establishing a new baseline algorithm for efficient LLM deployment without compromising performance. Our code has been made available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/ThinK.
Authors: Zhiqiang Wu, Yingjie Liu, Hanlin Dong, Xuan Tang, Jian Yang, Bo Jin, Mingsong Chen, Xian Wei
Abstract: Group Equivariant Convolution (GConv) empowers models to explore underlying symmetry in data, improving performance. However, real-world scenarios often deviate from ideal symmetric systems caused by physical permutation, characterized by non-trivial actions of a symmetry group, resulting in asymmetries that affect the outputs, a phenomenon known as Symmetry Breaking. Traditional GConv-based methods are constrained by rigid operational rules within group space, assuming data remains strictly symmetry after limited group transformations. This limitation makes it difficult to adapt to Symmetry-Breaking and non-rigid transformations. Motivated by this, we mainly focus on a common scenario: Rotational Symmetry-Breaking. By relaxing strict group transformations within Strict Rotation-Equivariant group $\mathbf{C}_n$, we redefine a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant group $\mathbf{R}_n$ and introduce a novel Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant GConv (R2GConv) with only a minimal increase of $4n$ parameters compared to GConv. Based on R2GConv, we propose a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant Network (R2Net) as the backbone and develop a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant Object Detector (R2Det) for 2D object detection. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed R2GConv in natural image classification, and R2Det achieves excellent performance in 2D object detection with improved generalization capabilities and robustness. The code is available in \texttt{https://github.com/wuer5/r2det}.
Authors: Ruizhe Chen, Yichen Li, Jianfei Yang, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
Abstract: Generating fair and accurate predictions plays a pivotal role in deploying large language models (LLMs) in the real world. However, existing debiasing methods inevitably generate unfair or incorrect predictions as they are designed and evaluated to achieve parity across different social groups but leave aside individual commonsense facts, resulting in modified knowledge that elicits unreasonable or undesired predictions. In this paper, we first establish a new bias mitigation benchmark, BiaScope, which systematically assesses performance by leveraging newly constructed datasets and metrics on knowledge retention and generalization. Then, we propose a novel debiasing approach, Fairness Stamp (FAST), which enables fine-grained calibration of individual social biases. FAST identifies the decisive layer responsible for storing social biases and then calibrates its outputs by integrating a small modular network, considering both bias mitigation and knowledge-preserving demands. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FAST surpasses state-of-the-art baselines with superior debiasing performance while not compromising the overall model capability for knowledge retention and downstream predictions. This highlights the potential of fine-grained debiasing strategies to achieve fairness in LLMs.
Authors: Liu Ziyin, Yizhou Xu, Isaac Chuang
Abstract: When symmetry is present in the loss function, the model is likely to be trapped in a low-capacity state that is sometimes known as a "collapse". Being trapped in these low-capacity states can be a major obstacle to training across many scenarios where deep learning technology is applied. We first prove two concrete mechanisms through which symmetries lead to reduced capacities and ignored features during training and inference. We then propose a simple and theoretically justified algorithm, syre, to remove almost all symmetry-induced low-capacity states in neural networks. When this type of entrapment is especially a concern, removing symmetries with the proposed method is shown to correlate well with improved optimization or performance. A remarkable merit of the proposed method is that it is model-agnostic and does not require any knowledge of the symmetry.
Authors: Taesung Kwon, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Recently, diffusion model-based inverse problem solvers (DIS) have emerged as state-of-the-art approaches for addressing inverse problems, including image super-resolution, deblurring, inpainting, etc. However, their application to video inverse problems arising from spatio-temporal degradation remains largely unexplored due to the challenges in training video diffusion models. To address this issue, here we introduce an innovative video inverse solver that leverages only image diffusion models. Specifically, by drawing inspiration from the success of the recent decomposed diffusion sampler (DDS), our method treats the time dimension of a video as the batch dimension of image diffusion models and solves spatio-temporal optimization problems within denoised spatio-temporal batches derived from each image diffusion model. Moreover, we introduce a batch-consistent diffusion sampling strategy that encourages consistency across batches by synchronizing the stochastic noise components in image diffusion models. Our approach synergistically combines batch-consistent sampling with simultaneous optimization of denoised spatio-temporal batches at each reverse diffusion step, resulting in a novel and efficient diffusion sampling strategy for video inverse problems. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively addresses various spatio-temporal degradations in video inverse problems, achieving state-of-the-art reconstructions. Project page: https://svi-diffusion.github.io/
Authors: Xiaoming Shi, Shiyu Wang, Yuqi Nie, Dianqi Li, Zhou Ye, Qingsong Wen, Ming Jin
Abstract: Deep learning for time series forecasting has seen significant advancements over the past decades. However, despite the success of large-scale pre-training in language and vision domains, pre-trained time series models remain limited in scale and operate at a high cost, hindering the development of larger capable forecasting models in real-world applications. In response, we introduce Time-MoE, a scalable and unified architecture designed to pre-train larger, more capable forecasting foundation models while reducing inference costs. By leveraging a sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) design, Time-MoE enhances computational efficiency by activating only a subset of networks for each prediction, reducing computational load while maintaining high model capacity. This allows Time-MoE to scale effectively without a corresponding increase in inference costs. Time-MoE comprises a family of decoder-only transformer models that operate in an auto-regressive manner and support flexible forecasting horizons with varying input context lengths. We pre-trained these models on our newly introduced large-scale data Time-300B, which spans over 9 domains and encompassing over 300 billion time points. For the first time, we scaled a time series foundation model up to 2.4 billion parameters, achieving significantly improved forecasting precision. Our results validate the applicability of scaling laws for training tokens and model size in the context of time series forecasting. Compared to dense models with the same number of activated parameters or equivalent computation budgets, our models consistently outperform them by large margin. These advancements position Time-MoE as a state-of-the-art solution for tackling real-world time series forecasting challenges with superior capability, efficiency, and flexibility.
Authors: Haodong Liang, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Lifeng Lai
Abstract: We explore the capability of transformers to address endogeneity in in-context linear regression. Our main finding is that transformers inherently possess a mechanism to handle endogeneity effectively using instrumental variables (IV). First, we demonstrate that the transformer architecture can emulate a gradient-based bi-level optimization procedure that converges to the widely used two-stage least squares $(\textsf{2SLS})$ solution at an exponential rate. Next, we propose an in-context pretraining scheme and provide theoretical guarantees showing that the global minimizer of the pre-training loss achieves a small excess loss. Our extensive experiments validate these theoretical findings, showing that the trained transformer provides more robust and reliable in-context predictions and coefficient estimates than the $\textsf{2SLS}$ method, in the presence of endogeneity.
Authors: Bocheng Zeng, Qi Wang, Mengtao Yan, Yang Liu, Ruizhi Chengze, Yi Zhang, Hongsheng Liu, Zidong Wang, Hao Sun
Abstract: Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) serves as a cornerstone for modeling complex dynamical systems. Recent progresses have demonstrated grand benefits of data-driven neural-based models for predicting spatiotemporal dynamics (e.g., tremendous speedup gain compared with classical numerical methods). However, most existing neural models rely on rich training data, have limited extrapolation and generalization abilities, and suffer to produce precise or reliable physical prediction under intricate conditions (e.g., irregular mesh or geometry, complex boundary conditions, diverse PDE parameters, etc.). To this end, we propose a new graph learning approach, namely, Physics-encoded Message Passing Graph Network (PhyMPGN), to model spatiotemporal PDE systems on irregular meshes given small training datasets. Specifically, we incorporate a GNN into a numerical integrator to approximate the temporal marching of spatiotemporal dynamics for a given PDE system. Considering that many physical phenomena are governed by diffusion processes, we further design a learnable Laplace block, which encodes the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator, to aid and guide the GNN learning in a physically feasible solution space. A boundary condition padding strategy is also designed to improve the model convergence and accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhyMPGN is capable of accurately predicting various types of spatiotemporal dynamics on coarse unstructured meshes, consistently achieves the state-of-the-art results, and outperforms other baselines with considerable gains.
Authors: Ghada Sokar, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville, Hugo Larochelle, Pablo Samuel Castro
Abstract: The use of deep neural networks in reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation as model size increases. While soft mixtures of experts (SoftMoEs) have recently shown promise in mitigating this issue for online RL, the reasons behind their effectiveness remain largely unknown. In this work we provide an in-depth analysis identifying the key factors driving this performance gain. We discover the surprising result that tokenizing the encoder output, rather than the use of multiple experts, is what is behind the efficacy of SoftMoEs. Indeed, we demonstrate that even with an appropriately scaled single expert, we are able to maintain the performance gains, largely thanks to tokenization.
Authors: Olivier Lepel, Anas Barakat
Abstract: Classical reinforcement learning (RL) typically assumes rational decision-making based on expected utility theory. However, this model has been shown to be empirically inconsistent with actual human preferences, as evidenced in psychology and behavioral economics. Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) provides a more nuanced model for human-based decision-making, capturing diverse attitudes and perceptions toward risk, gains, and losses. While prior work has integrated CPT with RL to solve a CPT policy optimization problem, the understanding and practical impact of this formulation remain limited. We revisit the CPT-RL framework, offering new theoretical insights into the nature of optimal policies. We further derive a novel policy gradient theorem for CPT objectives, generalizing the foundational result in standard RL. Building on this theorem, we design a model-free policy gradient algorithm for solving the CPT-RL problem and demonstrate its performance through simulations. Notably, our algorithm scales better to larger state spaces compared to existing zeroth-order methods. This work advances the integration of behavioral decision-making into RL.
Authors: Barak Gahtan, Robert J. Shahla, Alex M. Bronstein, Reuven Cohen
Abstract: The increasing adoption of the QUIC transport protocol has transformed encrypted web traffic, necessitating new methodologies for network analysis. However, existing datasets lack the scope, metadata, and decryption capabilities required for robust benchmarking in encrypted traffic research. We introduce VisQUIC, a large-scale dataset of 100,000 labeled QUIC traces from over 44,000 websites, collected over four months. Unlike prior datasets, VisQUIC provides SSL keys for controlled decryption, supports multiple QUIC implementations (Chromium QUIC, Facebooks mvfst, Cloudflares quiche), and introduces a novel image-based representation that enables machine learning-driven encrypted traffic analysis. The dataset includes standardized benchmarking tools, ensuring reproducibility. To demonstrate VisQUICs utility, we present a benchmarking task for estimating HTTP/3 responses in encrypted QUIC traffic, achieving 97% accuracy using only observable packet features. By publicly releasing VisQUIC, we provide an open foundation for advancing encrypted traffic analysis, QUIC security research, and network monitoring.
Authors: Anas Barakat, Souradip Chakraborty, Peihong Yu, Pratap Tokekar, Amrit Singh Bedi
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with general utilities has recently gained attention thanks to its ability to unify several problems, including imitation learning, pure exploration, and safe reinforcement learning. However, prior work for solving this general problem in a unified way has only focused on the tabular setting. This is restrictive when considering larger state-action spaces because of the need to estimate occupancy measures during policy optimization. In this work, we address this issue and propose to approximate occupancy measures within a function approximation class using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). We propose a simple policy gradient algorithm where an actor updates the policy parameters to maximize the general utility objective whereas a critic approximates the occupancy measure using MLE. We provide a statistical complexity analysis showing that our occupancy measure estimation error only scales with the dimension of our function approximation class rather than the size of the state action space. Under suitable assumptions, we establish first order stationarity and global optimality performance bounds for the proposed algorithm for nonconcave and concave general utilities respectively. We complement our methodological and theoretical findings with promising empirical results showing the scalability potential of our approach compared to existing tabular count-based approaches.
Authors: Po-Hung Yeh, Kuang-Huei Lee, Jun-Cheng Chen
Abstract: Aligning diffusion models with user preferences has been a key challenge. Existing methods for aligning diffusion models either require retraining or are limited to differentiable reward functions. To address these limitations, we propose a stochastic optimization approach, dubbed Demon, to guide the denoising process at inference time without backpropagation through reward functions or model retraining. Our approach works by controlling noise distribution in denoising steps to concentrate density on regions corresponding to high rewards through stochastic optimization. We provide comprehensive theoretical and empirical evidence to support and validate our approach, including experiments that use non-differentiable sources of rewards such as Visual-Language Model (VLM) APIs and human judgements. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach is the first inference-time, backpropagation-free preference alignment method for diffusion models. Our method can be easily integrated with existing diffusion models without further training. Our experiments show that the proposed approach significantly improves the average aesthetics scores for text-to-image generation. Implementation is available at https://github.com/aiiu-lab/DemonSampling.
Authors: Safwan Hossain, Evi Micha, Yiling Chen, Ariel Procaccia
Abstract: We propose a new variant of the strategic classification problem: a principal reveals a classifier, and $n$ agents report their (possibly manipulated) features to be classified. Motivated by real-world applications, our model crucially allows the manipulation of one agent to affect another; that is, it explicitly captures inter-agent externalities. The principal-agent interactions are formally modeled as a Stackelberg game, with the resulting agent manipulation dynamics captured as a simultaneous game. We show that under certain assumptions, the pure Nash Equilibrium of this agent manipulation game is unique and can be efficiently computed. Leveraging this result, PAC learning guarantees are established for the learner: informally, we show that it is possible to learn classifiers that minimize loss on the distribution, even when a random number of agents are manipulating their way to a pure Nash Equilibrium. We also comment on the optimization of such classifiers through gradient-based approaches. This work sets the theoretical foundations for a more realistic analysis of classifiers that are robust against multiple strategic actors interacting in a common environment.
Authors: Yang Zhou, Hao Shao, Letian Wang, Steven L. Waslander, Hongsheng Li, Yu Liu
Abstract: Predicting the future motion of surrounding agents is essential for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to operate safely in dynamic, human-robot-mixed environments. However, the scarcity of large-scale driving datasets has hindered the development of robust and generalizable motion prediction models, limiting their ability to capture complex interactions and road geometries. Inspired by recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), self-supervised learning (SSL) has gained significant attention in the motion prediction community for learning rich and transferable scene representations. Nonetheless, existing pre-training methods for motion prediction have largely focused on specific model architectures and single dataset, limiting their scalability and generalizability. To address these challenges, we propose SmartPretrain, a general and scalable SSL framework for motion prediction that is both model-agnostic and dataset-agnostic. Our approach integrates contrastive and reconstructive SSL, leveraging the strengths of both generative and discriminative paradigms to effectively represent spatiotemporal evolution and interactions without imposing architectural constraints. Additionally, SmartPretrain employs a dataset-agnostic scenario sampling strategy that integrates multiple datasets, enhancing data volume, diversity, and robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that SmartPretrain consistently improves the performance of state-of-the-art prediction models across datasets, data splits and main metrics. For instance, SmartPretrain significantly reduces the MissRate of Forecast-MAE by 10.6%. These results highlight SmartPretrain's effectiveness as a unified, scalable solution for motion prediction, breaking free from the limitations of the small-data regime. Codes are available at https://github.com/youngzhou1999/SmartPretrain
Authors: Hao Yan, Chaozhuo Li, Jun Yin, Zhigang Yu, Weihao Han, Mingzheng Li, Zhengxin Zeng, Hao Sun, Senzhang Wang
Abstract: Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications, encompassing extensive knowledge through multimodal attributes attached to nodes (e.g., texts and images) and topological structure representing node interactions. Despite its potential to advance diverse research fields like social networks and e-commerce, MAG representation learning (MAGRL) remains underexplored due to the lack of standardized datasets and evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we first propose MAGB, a comprehensive MAG benchmark dataset, featuring curated graphs from various domains with both textual and visual attributes. Based on MAGB dataset, we further systematically evaluate two mainstream MAGRL paradigms: $\textit{GNN-as-Predictor}$, which integrates multimodal attributes via Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and $\textit{VLM-as-Predictor}$, which harnesses Vision Language Models (VLMs) for zero-shot reasoning. Extensive experiments on MAGB reveal following critical insights: $\textit{(i)}$ Modality significances fluctuate drastically with specific domain characteristics. $\textit{(ii)}$ Multimodal embeddings can elevate the performance ceiling of GNNs. However, intrinsic biases among modalities may impede effective training, particularly in low-data scenarios. $\textit{(iii)}$ VLMs are highly effective at generating multimodal embeddings that alleviate the imbalance between textual and visual attributes. These discoveries, which illuminate the synergy between multimodal attributes and graph topologies, contribute to reliable benchmarks, paving the way for future MAG research. The MAGB dataset and evaluation pipeline are publicly available at https://github.com/sktsherlock/MAGB.
Authors: Guoxiong Gao, Yutong Wang, Jiedong Jiang, Qi Gao, Zihan Qin, Tianyi Xu, Bin Dong
Abstract: Verifiable formal languages like Lean have profoundly impacted mathematical reasoning, particularly through the use of large language models (LLMs) for automated reasoning. A significant challenge in training LLMs for these formal languages is the lack of parallel datasets that align natural language with formal language proofs. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel framework for translating the Mathlib4 corpus (a unified library of mathematics in formal language Lean 4) into natural language. Building upon this, we employ a dual augmentation strategy that combines tactic-based and informal-based approaches, leveraging the Lean-jixia system, a Lean 4 analyzer. We present the results of this pipeline on Mathlib4 as Herald (Hierarchy and Retrieval-based Translated Lean Dataset). We also propose the Herald Translator, which is fine-tuned on Herald. Herald translator achieves a 93.2% accuracy (Pass@128) on formalizing statements in the miniF2F-test and a 22.5% accuracy on our internal graduate-level textbook dataset, outperforming InternLM2-Math-Plus-7B (74.0% and 7.5%) and TheoremLlama (50.1% and 4.0%). Furthermore, we propose a section-level translation framework for real-world applications. As a direct application of Herald translator, we have successfully translated a template section in the Stack project, marking a notable progress in the automatic formalization of graduate-level mathematical literature. Our model, along with the datasets, are open-sourced to the public.
Authors: Qin Liu, Fei Wang, Chaowei Xiao, Muhao Chen
Abstract: Existing preference alignment is a one-size-fits-all alignment mechanism, where the part of the large language model (LLM) parametric knowledge with non-preferred features is uniformly blocked to all the users. However, this part of knowledge can be useful to advanced users whose expertise qualifies them to handle these information. The one-size-fits-all alignment mechanism undermines LLM's utility for these qualified users. To address this problem, we propose SudoLM, a framework that lets LLMs learn access control over specific parametric knowledge for users with different credentials via authorization alignment. SudoLM allows authorized users to unlock their access to all the parametric knowledge with an assigned SUDO key while blocking access to non-qualified users. Experiments on two application scenarios demonstrate that SudoLM effectively controls the user's access to the parametric knowledge and maintains its general utility.
Authors: Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Maram Hasanain, Sahinur Rahman Laskar, Naeemul Hassan, Firoj Alam
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as general-purpose task solvers across various fields. However, their capabilities remain limited when addressing domain-specific problems, particularly in downstream NLP tasks. Research has shown that models fine-tuned on instruction-based downstream NLP datasets outperform those that are not fine-tuned. While most efforts in this area have primarily focused on resource-rich languages like English and broad domains, little attention has been given to multilingual settings and specific domains. To address this gap, this study focuses on developing a specialized LLM, LlamaLens, for analyzing news and social media content in a multilingual context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle both domain specificity and multilinguality, with a particular focus on news and social media. Our experimental setup includes 18 tasks, represented by 52 datasets covering Arabic, English, and Hindi. We demonstrate that LlamaLens outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) on 23 testing sets, and achieves comparable performance on 8 sets. We make the models and resources publicly available for the research community (https://huggingface.co/collections/QCRI/llamalens-672f7e0604a0498c6a2f0fe9).
URLs: https://huggingface.co/collections/QCRI/llamalens-672f7e0604a0498c6a2f0fe9).
Authors: Xiyue Peng, Hengquan Guo, Jiawei Zhang, Dongqing Zou, Ziyu Shao, Honghao Wei, Xin Liu
Abstract: Balancing helpfulness and safety (harmlessness) is a critical challenge in aligning large language models (LLMs). Current approaches often decouple these two objectives, training separate preference models for helpfulness and safety, while framing safety as a constraint within a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) framework. This paper identifies a potential issue when using the widely adopted expected safety constraints for LLM safety alignment, termed "safety compensation", where the constraints are satisfied on expectation, but individual prompts may trade off safety, resulting in some responses being overly restrictive while others remain unsafe. To address this issue, we propose Rectified Policy Optimization (RePO), which replaces the expected safety constraint with critical safety constraints imposed on every prompt. At the core of RePO is a policy update mechanism driven by rectified policy gradients, which penalizes the strict safety violation of every prompt, thereby enhancing safety across nearly all prompts. Our experiments demonstrate that RePO outperforms strong baseline methods and significantly enhances LLM safety alignment.
Authors: Peter Holderrieth, Marton Havasi, Jason Yim, Neta Shaul, Itai Gat, Tommi Jaakkola, Brian Karrer, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Yaron Lipman
Abstract: We introduce Generator Matching, a modality-agnostic framework for generative modeling using arbitrary Markov processes. Generators characterize the infinitesimal evolution of a Markov process, which we leverage for generative modeling in a similar vein to flow matching: we construct conditional generators which generate single data points, then learn to approximate the marginal generator which generates the full data distribution. We show that Generator Matching unifies various generative modeling methods, including diffusion models, flow matching and discrete diffusion models. Furthermore, it expands the design space to new and unexplored Markov processes such as jump processes. Finally, Generator Matching enables the construction of superpositions of Markov generative models and enables the construction of multimodal models in a rigorous manner. We empirically validate our method on image and multimodal generation, e.g. showing that superposition with a jump process improves performance.
Authors: Viet Cuong Nguyen, Mohammad Taher, Dongwan Hong, Vinicius Konkolics Possobom, Vibha Thirunellayi Gopalakrishnan, Ekta Raj, Zihang Li, Heather J. Soled, Michael L. Birnbaum, Srijan Kumar, Munmun De Choudhury
Abstract: The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a promising solution to the global shortage of mental health professionals. However, their alignment with essential counseling competencies remains underexplored. We introduce CounselingBench, a novel NCMHCE-based benchmark evaluating 22 general-purpose and medical-finetuned LLMs across five key competencies. While frontier models surpass minimum aptitude thresholds, they fall short of expert-level performance, excelling in Intake, Assessment & Diagnosis but struggling with Core Counseling Attributes and Professional Practice & Ethics. Surprisingly, medical LLMs do not outperform generalist models in accuracy, though they provide slightly better justifications while making more context-related errors. These findings highlight the challenges of developing AI for mental health counseling, particularly in competencies requiring empathy and nuanced reasoning. Our results underscore the need for specialized, fine-tuned models aligned with core mental health counseling competencies and supported by human oversight before real-world deployment. Code and data associated with this manuscript can be found at: https://github.com/cuongnguyenx/CounselingBench
Authors: Yunqi Zhu, Wen Tang, Huayu Yang, Jinghao Niu, Liyang Dou, Yifan Gu, Yuanyuan Wu, Wensheng Zhang, Ying Sun, Xuebing Yang
Abstract: In this work, we leverage LLMs to produce medical qualification exam questions and the corresponding answers through few-shot prompts, investigating in-depth how LLMs meet the requirements in terms of coherence, evidence of statement, factual consistency, and professionalism etc. Utilizing a multicenter bidirectional anonymized database with respect to comorbid chronic diseases, named Elderly Comorbidity Medical Database (CECMed), we tasked LLMs with generating open-ended questions and answers based on a subset of sampled admission reports. For CECMed, the retrospective cohort includes patients enrolled from January 2010 to January 2022 while the prospective cohort from January 2023 to November 2023, with participants sourced from selected tertiary and community hospitals across the southern, northern, and central regions of China. A total of 8 widely used LLMs were used, including ERNIE 4, ChatGLM 4, Doubao, Hunyuan, Spark 4, Qwen, Conventional medical education requires sophisticated clinicians to formulate questions and answers based on prototypes from EHRs, which is heuristic and time-consuming. We found that mainstream LLMs could generate questions and answers with real-world EHRs at levels close to clinicians. Although current LLMs performed dissatisfactory in some aspects, medical students, interns and residents could reasonably make use of LLMs to facilitate understanding.
Authors: Vedant Das Swain, Qiuyue "Joy" Zhong, Jash Rajesh Parekh, Yechan Jeon, Roy Zimmermann, Mary Czerwinski, Jina Suh, Varun Mishra, Koustuv Saha, Javier Hernandez
Abstract: Client-Service Representatives (CSRs) are vital to organizations. Frequent interactions with disgruntled clients, however, disrupt their mental well-being. To help CSRs regulate their emotions while interacting with uncivil clients, we designed Care-Pilot, an LLM-powered assistant, and evaluated its efficacy, perception, and use. Our comparative analyses between 665 human and Care-Pilot-generated support messages highlight Care-Pilot's ability to adapt to and demonstrate empathy in various incivility incidents. Additionally, 143 CSRs assessed Care-Pilot's empathy as more sincere and actionable than human messages. Finally, we interviewed 20 CSRs who interacted with Care-Pilot in a simulation exercise. They reported that Care-Pilot helped them avoid negative thinking, recenter thoughts, and humanize clients; showing potential for bridging gaps in coworker support. Yet, they also noted deployment challenges and emphasized the indispensability of shared experiences. We discuss future designs and societal implications of AI-mediated emotional labor, underscoring empathy as a critical function for AI assistants for worker mental health.
Authors: Kadir Burak Buldu, S\"uleyman \"Ozdel, Ka Hei Carrie Lau, Mengdi Wang, Daniel Saad, Sofie Sch\"onborn, Auxane Boch, Enkelejda Kasneci, Efe Bozkir
Abstract: Recent developments in computer graphics, machine learning, and sensor technologies enable numerous opportunities for extended reality (XR) setups for everyday life, from skills training to entertainment. With large corporations offering affordable consumer-grade head-mounted displays (HMDs), XR will likely become pervasive, and HMDs will develop as personal devices like smartphones and tablets. However, having intelligent spaces and naturalistic interactions in XR is as important as technological advances so that users grow their engagement in virtual and augmented spaces. To this end, large language model (LLM)--powered non-player characters (NPCs) with speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) models bring significant advantages over conventional or pre-scripted NPCs for facilitating more natural conversational user interfaces (CUIs) in XR. This paper provides the community with an open-source, customizable, extendable, and privacy-aware Unity package, CUIfy, that facilitates speech-based NPC-user interaction with widely used LLMs, STT, and TTS models. Our package also supports multiple LLM-powered NPCs per environment and minimizes latency between different computational models through streaming to achieve usable interactions between users and NPCs. We publish our source code in the following repository: https://gitlab.lrz.de/hctl/cuify
Authors: Jingyi Zhou, Senlin Luo, Haofan Chen
Abstract: Text emotion detection constitutes a crucial foundation for advancing artificial intelligence from basic comprehension to the exploration of emotional reasoning. Most existing emotion detection datasets rely on manual annotations, which are associated with high costs, substantial subjectivity, and severe label imbalances. This is particularly evident in the inadequate annotation of micro-emotions and the absence of emotional intensity representation, which fail to capture the rich emotions embedded in sentences and adversely affect the quality of downstream task completion. By proposing an all-labels and training-set label regression method, we map label values to energy intensity levels, thereby fully leveraging the learning capabilities of machine models and the interdependencies among labels to uncover multiple emotions within samples. This led to the establishment of the Emotion Quantization Network (EQN) framework for micro-emotion detection and annotation. Using five commonly employed sentiment datasets, we conducted comparative experiments with various models, validating the broad applicability of our framework within NLP machine learning models. Based on the EQN framework, emotion detection and annotation are conducted on the GoEmotions dataset. A comprehensive comparison with the results from Google literature demonstrates that the EQN framework possesses a high capability for automatic detection and annotation of micro-emotions. The EQN framework is the first to achieve automatic micro-emotion annotation with energy-level scores, providing strong support for further emotion detection analysis and the quantitative research of emotion computing.
Authors: Mianqiu Huang, Xiaoran Liu, Shaojun Zhou, Mozhi Zhang, Qipeng Guo, Linyang Li, Chenkun Tan, Yang Gao, Pengyu Wang, Linlin Li, Qun Liu, Yaqian Zhou, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
Abstract: Recent advancements in model architectures and length extrapolation techniques have significantly extended the context length of large language models (LLMs), paving the way for their application in increasingly complex tasks. However, despite the growing capabilities of long-context LLMs, the safety issues in long-context scenarios remain underexplored. While safety alignment in short context has been widely studied, the safety concerns of long-context LLMs have not been adequately addressed. In this work, we introduce \textbf{LongSafety}, a comprehensive safety alignment dataset for long-context LLMs, containing 10 tasks and 17k samples, with an average length of 40.9k tokens. Our experiments demonstrate that training with LongSafety can enhance long-context safety performance while enhancing short-context safety and preserving general capabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that long-context safety does not equal long-context alignment with short-context safety data and LongSafety has generalizing capabilities in context length and long-context safety scenarios.
Authors: Wenbo Zhang, Aditya Majumdar, Amulya Yadav
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various NLP tasks but struggle with code-mixed (or code-switched) language understanding. For example, prior work benchmarking the performance of multilingual LLMs on code-mixed translation tasks has demonstrated that current state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs are ineffective in dealing with code-mixed languages. However, the question of how to improve the capability of multilingual LLMs to handle code-mixed language has not received any attention to date. In this paper, we tackle this research gap by proposing CHAI, a novel general-purpose framework for improving the ability of multilingual LLMs to handle code-mixed languages. CHAI relies on three novel contributions made in this paper. First, we explore the ability of LLMs to provide accurate annotations for code-mixed translation tasks. Second, we leverage this ability of LLMs as annotators to generate preference data for code-mixed translation tasks at scale, which are then used within a reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) procedure to improve LLMs' capability on code-mixed tasks. Third, we conduct a rigorous experimental evaluation across various real-world datasets and settings. Our analysis shows that CHAI-powered LLMs outperform state-of-the-art open-source LLMs by 25.66% (in terms of win rate adjudicated by human annotators) in code-mixed translation tasks. This work represents a first step towards developing more inclusive code-mixed LLMs.
Authors: Benedikt Alkin, Tobias Kronlachner, Samuele Papa, Stefan Pirker, Thomas Lichtenegger, Johannes Brandstetter
Abstract: Advancements in computing power have made it possible to numerically simulate large-scale fluid-mechanical and/or particulate systems, many of which are integral to core industrial processes. Among the different numerical methods available, the discrete element method (DEM) provides one of the most accurate representations of a wide range of physical systems involving granular and discontinuous materials. Consequently, DEM has become a widely accepted approach for tackling engineering problems connected to granular flows and powder mechanics. Additionally, DEM can be integrated with grid-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods, enabling the simulation of chemical processes taking place, e.g., in fluidized beds. However, DEM is computationally intensive because of the intrinsic multiscale nature of particulate systems, restricting simulation duration or number of particles. Towards this end, NeuralDEM presents an end-to-end approach to replace slow numerical DEM routines with fast, adaptable deep learning surrogates. NeuralDEM is capable of picturing long-term transport processes across different regimes using macroscopic observables without any reference to microscopic model parameters. First, NeuralDEM treats the Lagrangian discretization of DEM as an underlying continuous field, while simultaneously modeling macroscopic behavior directly as additional auxiliary fields. Second, NeuralDEM introduces multi-branch neural operators scalable to real-time modeling of industrially-sized scenarios - from slow and pseudo-steady to fast and transient. Such scenarios have previously posed insurmountable challenges for deep learning models. Notably, NeuralDEM faithfully models coupled CFD-DEM fluidized bed reactors of 160k CFD cells and 500k DEM particles for trajectories of 28s. NeuralDEM will open many new doors to advanced engineering and much faster process cycles.
Authors: James A. R. Marshall, Andrew B. Barron
Abstract: Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs) are hyped to revolutionize robotics. Here we question their utility. GPTs for autonomous robotics demand enormous and costly compute, excessive training times and (often) offboard wireless control. We contrast GPT state of the art with how tiny insect brains have achieved robust autonomy with none of these constraints. We highlight lessons that can be learned from biology to enhance the utility of GPTs in robotics.
Authors: Tianxing Chen, Yao Mu, Zhixuan Liang, Zanxin Chen, Shijia Peng, Qiangyu Chen, Mingkun Xu, Ruizhen Hu, Hongyuan Zhang, Xuelong Li, Ping Luo
Abstract: Recent advances in imitation learning for 3D robotic manipulation have shown promising results with diffusion-based policies. However, achieving human-level dexterity requires seamless integration of geometric precision and semantic understanding. We present G3Flow, a novel framework that constructs real-time semantic flow, a dynamic, object-centric 3D semantic representation by leveraging foundation models. Our approach uniquely combines 3D generative models for digital twin creation, vision foundation models for semantic feature extraction, and robust pose tracking for continuous semantic flow updates. This integration enables complete semantic understanding even under occlusions while eliminating manual annotation requirements. By incorporating semantic flow into diffusion policies, we demonstrate significant improvements in both terminal-constrained manipulation and cross-object generalization. Extensive experiments across five simulation tasks show that G3Flow consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving up to 68.3% and 50.1% average success rates on terminal-constrained manipulation and cross-object generalization tasks respectively. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of G3Flow in enhancing real-time dynamic semantic feature understanding for robotic manipulation policies.
Authors: Sumeet Ramesh Motwani, Chandler Smith, Rocktim Jyoti Das, Rafael Rafailov, Ivan Laptev, Philip H. S. Torr, Fabio Pizzati, Ronald Clark, Christian Schroeder de Witt
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce answers with a single chain-of-thought, which restricts their ability to explore reasoning paths or self-correct flawed outputs in complex tasks. In this paper, we introduce MALT (Multi-Agent LLM Training), a novel post-training strategy that divides the reasoning process into generation, verification, and refinement steps using a sequential pipeline of heterogeneous agents. During data generation, each agent is repeatedly sampled to form a multi-agent search tree, where final outputs are graded against ground-truth data. We then apply value iteration to propagate reward signals back to each role-conditioned model, automatically producing multi-agent post-training data without human or teacher-model supervision. Our off-policy approach allows each agent to specialize by learning from correct and incorrect trajectories, ultimately improving the end-to-end reasoning chain. On MATH, GSM8K, and CSQA, MALT surpasses the same baseline LLM with a relative improvement of 15.66%, 7.42%, and 9.40% respectively, making it an important advance towards multi-agent cooperative training.
Authors: Jingyu Lin, Jiaqi Gu, Lubin Fan, Bojian Wu, Yujing Lou, Renjie Chen, Ligang Liu, Jieping Ye
Abstract: Generating high-quality novel view renderings of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) in scenes featuring transient objects is challenging. We propose a novel hybrid representation, termed as HybridGS, using 2D Gaussians for transient objects per image and maintaining traditional 3D Gaussians for the whole static scenes. Note that, the 3DGS itself is better suited for modeling static scenes that assume multi-view consistency, but the transient objects appear occasionally and do not adhere to the assumption, thus we model them as planar objects from a single view, represented with 2D Gaussians. Our novel representation decomposes the scene from the perspective of fundamental viewpoint consistency, making it more reasonable. Additionally, we present a novel multi-view regulated supervision method for 3DGS that leverages information from co-visible regions, further enhancing the distinctions between the transients and statics. Then, we propose a straightforward yet effective multi-stage training strategy to ensure robust training and high-quality view synthesis across various settings. Experiments on benchmark datasets show our state-of-the-art performance of novel view synthesis in both indoor and outdoor scenes, even in the presence of distracting elements.
Authors: Haitian Zhang, Xiangyuan Wang, Chang Xu, Xinya Wang, Fang Xu, Huai Yu, Lei Yu, Wen Yang
Abstract: Fusing Events and RGB images for object detection leverages the robustness of Event cameras in adverse environments and the rich semantic information provided by RGB cameras. However, two critical mismatches: low-latency Events \textit{vs.}~high-latency RGB frames; temporally sparse labels in training \textit{vs.}~continuous flow in inference, significantly hinder the high-frequency fusion-based object detection. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{F}requency-\textbf{A}daptive Low-Latency \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etector (FAOD). FAOD aligns low-frequency RGB frames with high-frequency Events through an Align Module, which reinforces cross-modal style and spatial proximity to address the Event-RGB Mismatch. We further propose a training strategy, Time Shift, which enforces the module to align the prediction from temporally shifted Event-RGB pairs and their original representation, that is, consistent with Event-aligned annotations. This strategy enables the network to use high-frequency Event data as the primary reference while treating low-frequency RGB images as supplementary information, retaining the low-latency nature of the Event stream toward high-frequency detection. Furthermore, we observe that these corrected Event-RGB pairs demonstrate better generalization from low training frequency to higher inference frequencies compared to using Event data alone. Extensive experiments on the PKU-DAVIS-SOD and DSEC-Detection datasets demonstrate that our FAOD achieves SOTA performance. Specifically, in the PKU-DAVIS-SOD Dataset, FAOD achieves 9.8 points improvement in terms of the mAP in fully paired Event-RGB data with only a quarter of the parameters compared to SODFormer, and even maintains robust performance (only a 3 points drop in mAP) under 80$\times$ Event-RGB frequency mismatch.
Authors: Jorge Guevara, Victor Nascimento, Johannes Schmude, Daniel Salles, Simon Corbeil-L\'etourneau, Madalina Surcel, Dominique Brunet
Abstract: Wind downscaling is essential for improving the spatial resolution of weather forecasts, particularly in operational Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). This study advances wind downscaling by extending the DownGAN framework introduced by Annau et al.,to operational datasets from the Global Deterministic Prediction System (GDPS) and High-Resolution Deterministic Prediction System (HRDPS), covering the entire Canadian domain. We enhance the model by incorporating high-resolution static covariates, such as HRDPS-derived topography, into a Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty, implemented using a UNET-based generator. Following the DownGAN framework, our methodology integrates low-resolution GDPS forecasts (15 km, 10-day horizon) and high-resolution HRDPS forecasts (2.5 km, 48-hour horizon) with Frequency Separation techniques adapted from computer vision. Through robust training and inference over the Canadian region, we demonstrate the operational scalability of our approach, achieving significant improvements in wind downscaling accuracy. Statistical validation highlights reductions in root mean square error (RMSE) and log spectral distance (LSD) metrics compared to the original DownGAN. High-resolution conditioning covariates and Frequency Separation strategies prove instrumental in enhancing model performance. This work underscores the potential for extending high-resolution wind forecasts beyond the 48-hour horizon, bridging the gap to the 10-day low resolution global forecast window.
Authors: Alexis Fox, Samarth Swarup, Abhijin Adiga
Abstract: Considering the difficulty of interpreting generative model output, there is significant current research focused on determining meaningful evaluation metrics. Several recent approaches utilize "precision" and "recall," borrowed from the classification domain, to individually quantify the output fidelity (realism) and output diversity (representation of the real data variation), respectively. With the increase in metric proposals, there is a need for a unifying perspective, allowing for easier comparison and clearer explanation of their benefits and drawbacks. To this end, we unify a class of kth-nearest-neighbors (kNN)-based metrics under an information-theoretic lens using approaches from kNN density estimation. Additionally, we propose a tri-dimensional metric composed of Precision Cross-Entropy (PCE), Recall Cross-Entropy (RCE), and Recall Entropy (RE), which separately measure fidelity and two distinct aspects of diversity, inter- and intra-class. Our domain-agnostic metric, derived from the information-theoretic concepts of entropy and cross-entropy, can be dissected for both sample- and mode-level analysis. Our detailed experimental results demonstrate the sensitivity of our metric components to their respective qualities and reveal undesirable behaviors of other metrics.
Authors: Chuan He
Abstract: In this paper, we consider an unconstrained stochastic optimization problem where the objective function exhibits high-order smoothness. Specifically, we propose a new stochastic first-order method (SFOM) with multi-extrapolated momentum, in which multiple extrapolations are performed in each iteration, followed by a momentum update based on these extrapolations. We demonstrate that the proposed SFOM can accelerate optimization by exploiting the high-order smoothness of the objective function $f$. Assuming that the $p$th-order derivative of $f$ is Lipschitz continuous for some $p\ge2$, and under additional mild assumptions, we establish that our method achieves a sample complexity of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-(3p+1)/p})$ for finding a point $x$ such that $\mathbb{E}[\|\nabla f(x)\|]\le\epsilon$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first SFOM to leverage arbitrary-order smoothness of the objective function for acceleration, resulting in a sample complexity that improves upon the best-known results without assuming the mean-squared smoothness condition. Preliminary numerical experiments validate the practical performance of our method and support our theoretical findings.
Authors: Aditya Bhattacharya, Simone Stumpf, Robin De Croon, Katrien Verbert
Abstract: Representation bias is one of the most common types of biases in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, causing AI models to perform poorly on underrepresented data segments. Although AI practitioners use various methods to reduce representation bias, their effectiveness is often constrained by insufficient domain knowledge in the debiasing process. To address this gap, this paper introduces a set of generic design guidelines for effectively involving domain experts in representation debiasing. We instantiated our proposed guidelines in a healthcare-focused application and evaluated them through a comprehensive mixed-methods user study with 35 healthcare experts. Our findings show that involving domain experts can reduce representation bias without compromising model accuracy. Based on our findings, we also offer recommendations for developers to build robust debiasing systems guided by our generic design guidelines, ensuring more effective inclusion of domain experts in the debiasing process.
Authors: Saman Motamed, Laura Culp, Kevin Swersky, Priyank Jaini, Robert Geirhos
Abstract: AI video generation is undergoing a revolution, with quality and realism advancing rapidly. These advances have led to a passionate scientific debate: Do video models learn "world models" that discover laws of physics -- or, alternatively, are they merely sophisticated pixel predictors that achieve visual realism without understanding the physical principles of reality? We address this question by developing Physics-IQ, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that can only be solved by acquiring a deep understanding of various physical principles, like fluid dynamics, optics, solid mechanics, magnetism and thermodynamics. We find that across a range of current models (Sora, Runway, Pika, Lumiere, Stable Video Diffusion, and VideoPoet), physical understanding is severely limited, and unrelated to visual realism. At the same time, some test cases can already be successfully solved. This indicates that acquiring certain physical principles from observation alone may be possible, but significant challenges remain. While we expect rapid advances ahead, our work demonstrates that visual realism does not imply physical understanding. Our project page is at https://physics-iq.github.io; code at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-IQ-benchmark.
URLs: https://physics-iq.github.io;, https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-IQ-benchmark.
Authors: Saibo Geng, Hudson Cooper, Micha{\l} Moskal, Samuel Jenkins, Julian Berman, Nathan Ranchin, Robert West, Eric Horvitz, Harsha Nori
Abstract: Reliably generating structured outputs has become a critical capability for modern language model (LM) applications. Constrained decoding has emerged as the dominant technology across sectors for enforcing structured outputs during generation. Despite its growing adoption, little has been done with the systematic evaluation of the behaviors and performance of constrained decoding. Constrained decoding frameworks have standardized around JSON Schema as a structured data format, with most uses guaranteeing constraint compliance given a schema. However, there is poor understanding of the effectiveness of the methods in practice. We present an evaluation framework to assess constrained decoding approaches across three critical dimensions: efficiency in generating constraint-compliant outputs, coverage of diverse constraint types, and quality of the generated outputs. To facilitate this evaluation, we introduce JSONSchemaBench, a benchmark for constrained decoding comprising 10K real-world JSON schemas that encompass a wide range of constraints with varying complexity. We pair the benchmark with the existing official JSON Schema Test Suite and evaluate six state-of-the-art constrained decoding frameworks, including Guidance, Outlines, Llamacpp, XGrammar, OpenAI, and Gemini. Through extensive experiments, we gain insights into the capabilities and limitations of constrained decoding on structured generation with real-world JSON schemas. Our work provides actionable insights for improving constrained decoding frameworks and structured generation tasks, setting a new standard for evaluating constrained decoding and structured generation. We release JSONSchemaBench at https://github.com/guidance-ai/jsonschemabench
Authors: Jing Liu, Zhenchao Ma, Zepu Wang, Chenxuanyin Zou, Jiayang Ren, Zehua Wang, Liang Song, Bo Hu, Yang Liu, Victor C. M. Leung
Abstract: Diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as a powerful class of generative AI models, showing remarkable potential in anomaly detection (AD) tasks across various domains, such as cybersecurity, fraud detection, healthcare, and manufacturing. The intersection of these two fields, termed diffusion models for anomaly detection (DMAD), offers promising solutions for identifying deviations in increasingly complex and high-dimensional data. In this survey, we review recent advances in DMAD research. We begin by presenting the fundamental concepts of AD and DMs, followed by a comprehensive analysis of classic DM architectures including DDPMs, DDIMs, and Score SDEs. We further categorize existing DMAD methods into reconstruction-based, density-based, and hybrid approaches, providing detailed examinations of their methodological innovations. We also explore the diverse tasks across different data modalities, encompassing image, time series, video, and multimodal data analysis. Furthermore, we discuss critical challenges and emerging research directions, including computational efficiency, model interpretability, robustness enhancement, edge-cloud collaboration, and integration with large language models. The collection of DMAD research papers and resources is available at https://github.com/fdjingliu/DMAD.
Authors: Yiyi Zhang, Xingyu Chen, Kexin Chen, Yuyang Du, Xilin Dang, Pheng-Ann Heng
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed extensive efforts to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains, alongside growing attention to their ethical implications. However, a critical challenge remains largely overlooked: LLMs must balance between rejecting harmful requests for safety and accommodating legitimate ones for utility. This paper presents a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) based alignment framework that achieves better overall performance by addressing this ethical-utility trade-off, using chemical domain applications as a proof-of-concept. Our alignment pipeline starts with a GPT-assisted three-phase data generation scheme, in which we create LibraChemQA, a chemical question-answering dataset comprising 31.6k triplet instances. By incorporating an innovative balanced seed in the data generation process, our framework systematically considers both legitimate and illegitimate requests. The framework also introduces a rephrasing mechanism for efficient data augmentation that enhances the model's chemical comprehension. We further develop a novel hybrid evaluation scheme with LLM judges for precise assessment of both safety and utility. Experimental results demonstrate our model's substantial improvements in overall performance where both safety and utility are considered - the resulting model outperforms leading LLMs including Claude-3, GPT-4o, and LLaMA-3 by margins of 13.44%, 7.16%, and 7.10% respectively on our released benchmark. At the end of this paper, we analyze experimental results obtained from testing DeepSeek-R1 on our benchmark and reveal the critical ethical concerns raised by this highly acclaimed model. We highlight that the long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning process employed by DeepSeek-R1, as well as other LLMs distilled from it, introduces significant ethical vulnerabilities when exposed to users.
Authors: Junyeob Baek, Yi-Fu Wu, Gautam Singh, Sungjin Ahn
Abstract: Humans have an innate ability to decompose their perceptions of the world into objects and their attributes, such as colors, shapes, and movement patterns. This cognitive process enables us to imagine novel futures by recombining familiar concepts. However, replicating this ability in artificial intelligence systems has proven challenging, particularly when it comes to modeling videos into compositional concepts and generating unseen, recomposed futures without relying on auxiliary data, such as text, masks, or bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose Dreamweaver, a neural architecture designed to discover hierarchical and compositional representations from raw videos and generate compositional future simulations. Our approach leverages a novel Recurrent Block-Slot Unit (RBSU) to decompose videos into their constituent objects and attributes. In addition, Dreamweaver uses a multi-future-frame prediction objective to capture disentangled representations for dynamic concepts more effectively as well as static concepts. In experiments, we demonstrate our model outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines for world modeling when evaluated under the DCI framework across multiple datasets. Furthermore, we show how the modularized concept representations of our model enable compositional imagination, allowing the generation of novel videos by recombining attributes from previously seen objects. cun-bjy.github.io/dreamweaver-website
Authors: Armand Foucault (IMT, ANITI), Franck Mamalet (ANITI), Fran\c{c}ois Malgouyres (IMT)
Abstract: Binary and sparse ternary weights in neural networks enable faster computations and lighter representations, facilitating their use on edge devices with limited computational power. Meanwhile, vanilla RNNs are highly sensitive to changes in their recurrent weights, making the binarization and ternarization of these weights inherently challenging. To date, no method has successfully achieved binarization or ternarization of vanilla RNN weights. We present a new approach leveraging the properties of Hadamard matrices to parameterize a subset of binary and sparse ternary orthogonal matrices. This method enables the training of orthogonal RNNs (ORNNs) with binary and sparse ternary recurrent weights, effectively creating a specific class of binary and sparse ternary vanilla RNNs. The resulting ORNNs, called HadamRNN and lock-HadamRNN, are evaluated on benchmarks such as the copy task, permuted and sequential MNIST tasks, and IMDB dataset. Despite binarization or sparse ternarization, these RNNs maintain performance levels comparable to state-of-the-art full-precision models, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, our approach is the first solution with binary recurrent weights capable of tackling the copy task over 1000 timesteps.
Authors: Thierry Bossy, Julien Vignoud, Tahseen Rabbani, Juan R. Troncoso Pastoriza, Martin Jaggi
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a popular paradigm for collaborative training which avoids direct data exposure between clients. However, data privacy issues still remain: FL-trained large language models are capable of memorizing and completing phrases and sentences contained in training data when given with their prefixes. Thus, it is possible for adversarial and honest-but-curious clients to recover training data of other participants simply through targeted prompting. In this work, we demonstrate that a popular and simple fine-tuning strategy, low-rank adaptation (LoRA), reduces memorization during FL up to a factor of 10. We study this effect by performing a medical question-answering fine-tuning task and injecting multiple replicas of out-of-distribution sensitive sequences drawn from an external clinical dataset. We observe a reduction in memorization for a wide variety of Llama 2 and 3 models, and find that LoRA can reduce memorization in centralized learning as well. Furthermore, we show that LoRA can be combined with other privacy-preserving techniques such as gradient clipping and Gaussian noising, secure aggregation, and Goldfish loss to further improve record-level privacy while maintaining performance.
Authors: Gauri Pradhan, Joonas J\"alk\"o, Marlon Tobaben, Antti Honkela
Abstract: Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) have emerged as a valuable framework for evaluating privacy leakage by machine learning models. Score-based MIAs are distinguished, in particular, by their ability to exploit the confidence scores that the model generates for particular inputs. Existing score-based MIAs implicitly assume that the adversary has access to the target model's hyperparameters, which can be used to train the shadow models for the attack. In this work, we demonstrate that the knowledge of target hyperparameters is not a prerequisite for MIA in the transfer learning setting. Based on this, we propose a novel approach to select the hyperparameters for training the shadow models for MIA when the attacker has no prior knowledge about them by matching the output distributions of target and shadow models. We demonstrate that using the new approach yields hyperparameters that lead to an attack near indistinguishable in performance from an attack that uses target hyperparameters to train the shadow models. Furthermore, we study the empirical privacy risk of unaccounted use of training data for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in differentially private (DP) transfer learning. We find no statistically significant evidence that performing HPO using training data would increase vulnerability to MIA.
Authors: Yangguang Li, Zi-Xin Zou, Zexiang Liu, Dehu Wang, Yuan Liang, Zhipeng Yu, Xingchao Liu, Yuan-Chen Guo, Ding Liang, Wanli Ouyang, Yan-Pei Cao
Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion techniques have propelled image and video generation to unprecedented levels of quality, significantly accelerating the deployment and application of generative AI. However, 3D shape generation technology has so far lagged behind, constrained by limitations in 3D data scale, complexity of 3D data processing, and insufficient exploration of advanced techniques in the 3D domain. Current approaches to 3D shape generation face substantial challenges in terms of output quality, generalization capability, and alignment with input conditions. We present TripoSG, a new streamlined shape diffusion paradigm capable of generating high-fidelity 3D meshes with precise correspondence to input images. Specifically, we propose: 1) A large-scale rectified flow transformer for 3D shape generation, achieving state-of-the-art fidelity through training on extensive, high-quality data. 2) A hybrid supervised training strategy combining SDF, normal, and eikonal losses for 3D VAE, achieving high-quality 3D reconstruction performance. 3) A data processing pipeline to generate 2 million high-quality 3D samples, highlighting the crucial rules for data quality and quantity in training 3D generative models. Through comprehensive experiments, we have validated the effectiveness of each component in our new framework. The seamless integration of these parts has enabled TripoSG to achieve state-of-the-art performance in 3D shape generation. The resulting 3D shapes exhibit enhanced detail due to high-resolution capabilities and demonstrate exceptional fidelity to input images. Moreover, TripoSG demonstrates improved versatility in generating 3D models from diverse image styles and contents, showcasing strong generalization capabilities. To foster progress and innovation in the field of 3D generation, we will make our model publicly available.
Authors: Jorgen Cani, Panagiotis Koletsis, Konstantinos Foteinos, Ioannis Kefaloukos, Lampros Argyriou, Manolis Falelakis, Iv\'an Del Pino, Angel Santamaria-Navarro, Martin \v{C}ech, Ond\v{r}ej Severa, Alessandro Umbrico, Francesca Fracasso, AndreA Orlandini, Dimitrios Drakoulis, Evangelos Markakis, Iraklis Varlamis, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos
Abstract: The increasing complexity of natural disaster incidents demands innovative technological solutions to support first responders in their efforts. This paper introduces the TRIFFID system, a comprehensive technical framework that integrates unmanned ground and aerial vehicles with advanced artificial intelligence functionalities to enhance disaster response capabilities across wildfires, urban floods, and post-earthquake search and rescue missions. By leveraging state-of-the-art autonomous navigation, semantic perception, and human-robot interaction technologies, TRIFFID provides a sophisticated system composed of the following key components: hybrid robotic platform, centralized ground station, custom communication infrastructure, and smartphone application. The defined research and development activities demonstrate how deep neural networks, knowledge graphs, and multimodal information fusion can enable robots to autonomously navigate and analyze disaster environments, reducing personnel risks and accelerating response times. The proposed system enhances emergency response teams by providing advanced mission planning, safety monitoring, and adaptive task execution capabilities. Moreover, it ensures real-time situational awareness and operational support in complex and risky situations, facilitating rapid and precise information collection and coordinated actions.
Authors: Duc Kieu, Kien Do, Toan Nguyen, Dang Nguyen, Thin Nguyen
Abstract: Diffusion bridges have shown potential in paired image-to-image (I2I) translation tasks. However, existing methods are limited by their unidirectional nature, requiring separate models for forward and reverse translations. This not only doubles the computational cost but also restricts their practicality. In this work, we introduce the Bidirectional Diffusion Bridge Model (BDBM), a scalable approach that facilitates bidirectional translation between two coupled distributions using a single network. BDBM leverages the Chapman-Kolmogorov Equation for bridges, enabling it to model data distribution shifts across timesteps in both forward and backward directions by exploiting the interchangeability of the initial and target timesteps within this framework. Notably, when the marginal distribution given endpoints is Gaussian, BDBM's transition kernels in both directions possess analytical forms, allowing for efficient learning with a single network. We demonstrate the connection between BDBM and existing bridge methods, such as Doob's h-transform and variational approaches, and highlight its advantages. Extensive experiments on high-resolution I2I translation tasks demonstrate that BDBM not only enables bidirectional translation with minimal additional cost but also outperforms state-of-the-art bridge models. Our source code is available at [https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM||https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM].
URLs: https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM, https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM].
Authors: Elan Markowitz, Anil Ramakrishna, Ninareh Mehrabi, Charith Peris, Rahul Gupta, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan
Abstract: As the world changes, we need to be able to update our models and correct false information without costly retraining. Knowledge-based model editing enables precise modifications to the weights of large language models in order to modify the information encoded within. Recent approaches have seen success in enabling recall of edited information for thousands of edits at once. However, these approaches fail to produce edits that account for associated contextual information. We present K-Edit, an effective approach to generating contextually consistent knowledge edits. By using knowledge graphs, which maintain contextual consistency when an edge is edited, we are able to generate additional \textit{contextual edits} that ensure consistency of related information in the language model. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in multi-hop question answering while maintaining the general effectiveness and scalability of model edits.
Authors: Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Y. X. Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
Abstract: Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention offers a promising direction for improving efficiency while maintaining model capabilities. We present NSA, a Natively trainable Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithmic innovations with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. NSA employs a dynamic hierarchical sparse strategy, combining coarse-grained token compression with fine-grained token selection to preserve both global context awareness and local precision. Our approach advances sparse attention design with two key innovations: (1) We achieve substantial speedups through arithmetic intensity-balanced algorithm design, with implementation optimizations for modern hardware. (2) We enable end-to-end training, reducing pretraining computation without sacrificing model performance. As shown in Figure 1, experiments show the model pretrained with NSA maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. Meanwhile, NSA achieves substantial speedups over Full Attention on 64k-length sequences across decoding, forward propagation, and backward propagation, validating its efficiency throughout the model lifecycle.
Authors: Kaiwen Zhou, Chengzhi Liu, Xuandong Zhao, Shreedhar Jangam, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Dawn Song, Xin Eric Wang
Abstract: The rapid development of large reasoning models, such as OpenAI-o3 and DeepSeek-R1, has led to significant improvements in complex reasoning over non-reasoning large language models~(LLMs). However, their enhanced capabilities, combined with the open-source access of models like DeepSeek-R1, raise serious safety concerns, particularly regarding their potential for misuse. In this work, we present a comprehensive safety assessment of these reasoning models, leveraging established safety benchmarks to evaluate their compliance with safety regulations. Furthermore, we investigate their susceptibility to adversarial attacks, such as jailbreaking and prompt injection, to assess their robustness in real-world applications. Through our multi-faceted analysis, we uncover four key findings: (1) There is a significant safety gap between the open-source R1 models and the o3-mini model, on both safety benchmark and attack, suggesting more safety effort on R1 is needed. (2) The distilled reasoning model shows poorer safety performance compared to its safety-aligned base models. (3) The stronger the model's reasoning ability, the greater the potential harm it may cause when answering unsafe questions. (4) The thinking process in R1 models pose greater safety concerns than their final answers. Our study provides insights into the security implications of reasoning models and highlights the need for further advancements in R1 models' safety to close the gap.
Authors: Jeremy Avigad
Abstract: This is an essay about the value of mathematical and symbolic reasoning in the age of AI.
Authors: Vignesh Kothapalli, Hamed Firooz, Maziar Sanjabi
Abstract: We introduce CoT-ICL Lab, a framework and methodology to generate synthetic tokenized datasets and systematically study chain-of-thought (CoT) in-context learning (ICL) in language models. CoT-ICL Lab allows fine grained control over the complexity of in-context examples by decoupling (1) the causal structure involved in chain token generation from (2) the underlying token processing functions. We train decoder-only transformers (up to 700M parameters) on these datasets and show that CoT accelerates the accuracy transition to higher values across model sizes. In particular, we find that model depth is crucial for leveraging CoT with limited in-context examples, while more examples help shallow models match deeper model performance. Additionally, limiting the diversity of token processing functions throughout training improves causal structure learning via ICL. We also interpret these transitions by analyzing transformer embeddings and attention maps. Overall, CoT-ICL Lab serves as a simple yet powerful testbed for theoretical and empirical insights into ICL and CoT in language models.
Authors: Yintao He, Haiyu Mao, Christina Giannoula, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Juan G\'omez-Luna, Huawei Li, Xiaowei Li, Ying Wang, Onur Mutlu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for natural language understanding and text generation. An LLM model relies on a time-consuming step called LLM decoding to generate output tokens. Several prior works focus on improving the performance of LLM decoding using parallelism techniques, such as batching and speculative decoding. State-of-the-art LLM decoding has both compute-bound and memory-bound kernels. Some prior works statically identify and map these different kernels to a heterogeneous architecture consisting of both processing-in-memory (PIM) units and computation-centric accelerators. We observe that characteristics of LLM decoding kernels (e.g., whether or not a kernel is memory-bound) can change dynamically due to parameter changes to meet user and/or system demands, making (1) static kernel mapping to PIM units and computation-centric accelerators suboptimal, and (2) one-size-fits-all approach of designing PIM units inefficient due to a large degree of heterogeneity even in memory-bound kernels. In this paper, we aim to accelerate LLM decoding while considering the dynamically changing characteristics of the kernels involved. We propose PAPI (PArallel Decoding with PIM), a PIM-enabled heterogeneous architecture that exploits dynamic scheduling of compute-bound or memory-bound kernels to suitable hardware units. PAPI has two key mechanisms: (1) online kernel characterization to dynamically schedule kernels to the most suitable hardware units at runtime and (2) a PIM-enabled heterogeneous computing system that harmoniously orchestrates both computation-centric processing units and hybrid PIM units with different computing capabilities. Our experimental results on three broadly-used LLMs show that PAPI achieves 1.8$\times$ and 11.1$\times$ speedups over a state-of-the-art heterogeneous LLM accelerator and a state-of-the-art PIM-only LLM accelerator, respectively.
Authors: Leonardo Berti, Gjergji Kasneci
Abstract: Stock Price Trend Prediction (SPTP) based on Limit Order Book (LOB) data is a fundamental challenge in financial markets. Despite advances in deep learning, existing models fail to generalize across different market conditions and struggle to reliably predict short-term trends. Surprisingly, by adapting a simple MLP-based architecture to LOB, we show that we surpass SoTA performance; thus, challenging the necessity of complex architectures. Unlike past work that shows robustness issues, we propose TLOB, a transformer-based model that uses a dual attention mechanism to capture spatial and temporal dependencies in LOB data. This allows it to adaptively focus on the market microstructure, making it particularly effective for longer-horizon predictions and volatile market conditions. We also introduce a new labeling method that improves on previous ones, removing the horizon bias. We evaluate TLOB's effectiveness using the established FI-2010 benchmark, which exceeds the state-of-the-art by an average of 3.7 F1-score(\%). Additionally, TLOB shows improvements on Tesla and Intel with a 1.3 and 7.7 increase in F1-score(\%), respectively. Additionally, we empirically show how stock price predictability has declined over time (-6.68 absolute points in F1-score(\%)), highlighting the growing market efficiencies. Predictability must be considered in relation to transaction costs, so we experimented with defining trends using an average spread, reflecting the primary transaction cost. The resulting performance deterioration underscores the complexity of translating trend classification into profitable trading strategies. We argue that our work provides new insights into the evolving landscape of stock price trend prediction and sets a strong foundation for future advancements in financial AI. We release the code at https://github.com/LeonardoBerti00/TLOB.
Authors: Parichat Suknark, Sompote Youwaib, Tipok Kitkobsin, Sirintornthep Towprayoon, Chart Chiemchaisri, Komsilp Wangyao
Abstract: Accurate prediction of shear strength parameters in Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) remains a critical challenge in geotechnical engineering due to the heterogeneous nature of waste materials and their temporal evolution through degradation processes. This paper presents a novel explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) framework for evaluating cohesion and friction angle across diverse MSW compositional profiles. The proposed model integrates a multi-layer perceptron architecture with SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) analysis to provide transparent insights into how specific waste components influence strength characteristics. Training data encompassed large-scale direct shear tests across various waste compositions and degradation states. The model demonstrated superior predictive accuracy compared to traditional gradient boosting methods, achieving mean absolute percentage errors of 7.42% and 14.96% for friction angle and cohesion predictions, respectively. Through SHAP analysis, the study revealed that fibrous materials and particle size distribution were primary drivers of shear strength variation, with food waste and plastics showing significant but non-linear effects. The model's explainability component successfully quantified these relationships, enabling evidence-based recommendations for waste management practices. This research bridges the gap between advanced machine learning and geotechnical engineering practice, offering a reliable tool for rapid assessment of MSW mechanical properties while maintaining interpretability for engineering decision-making.
Authors: Marcos Florencio, Luiz Alencar, Bianca Lima
Abstract: Every commercially available, state-of-the-art neural network consume plain input data, which is a well-known privacy concern. We propose a new architecture based on homomorphic encryption, which allows the neural network to operate on encrypted data. We show that Homomorphic Neural Networks (HNN) can achieve full privacy and security while maintaining levels of accuracy comparable to plain neural networks. We also introduce a new layer, the Differentiable Soft-Argmax, which allows the calibration of output logits in the encrypted domain, raising the entropy of the activation parameters, thus improving the security of the model, while keeping the overall noise below the acceptable noise budget. Experiments were conducted using the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST-2) corpora on the DistilBERT base uncased finetuned SST-2 English sentiment analysis model, and the results show that the HNN model can achieve up to 82.5% of the accuracy of the plain model while maintaining full privacy and security.
Authors: Chaohao Yuan, Kangfei Zhao, Ercan Engin Kuruoglu, Liang Wang, Tingyang Xu, Wenbing Huang, Deli Zhao, Hong Cheng, Yu Rong
Abstract: Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated a strong capability in modeling graph structures by addressing the intrinsic limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs), such as over-smoothing and over-squashing. Recent studies have proposed diverse architectures, enhanced explainability, and practical applications for Graph Transformers. In light of these rapid developments, we conduct a comprehensive review of Graph Transformers, covering aspects such as their architectures, theoretical foundations, and applications within this survey. We categorize the architecture of Graph Transformers according to their strategies for processing structural information, including graph tokenization, positional encoding, structure-aware attention and model ensemble. Furthermore, from the theoretical perspective, we examine the expressivity of Graph Transformers in various discussed architectures and contrast them with other advanced graph learning algorithms to discover the connections. Furthermore, we provide a summary of the practical applications where Graph Transformers have been utilized, such as molecule, protein, language, vision, traffic, brain and material data. At the end of this survey, we will discuss the current challenges and prospective directions in Graph Transformers for potential future research.
Authors: Haiteng Zhao, Chang Ma, Fangzhi Xu, Lingpeng Kong, Zhi-Hong Deng
Abstract: The applications of large language models (LLMs) in various biological domains have been explored recently, but their reasoning ability in complex biological systems, such as pathways, remains underexplored, which is crucial for predicting biological phenomena, formulating hypotheses, and designing experiments. This work explores the potential of LLMs in pathway reasoning. We introduce BioMaze, a dataset with 5.1K complex pathway problems derived from real research, covering various biological contexts including natural dynamic changes, disturbances, additional intervention conditions, and multi-scale research targets. Our evaluation of methods such as CoT and graph-augmented reasoning, shows that LLMs struggle with pathway reasoning, especially in perturbed systems. To address this, we propose PathSeeker, an LLM agent that enhances reasoning through interactive subgraph-based navigation, enabling a more effective approach to handling the complexities of biological systems in a scientifically aligned manner. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/zhao-ht/BioMaze.
Authors: Jishizhan Chen, Qingzeng Zhang
Abstract: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare is transforming clinical decision-making and hospital operations. DeepSeek has emerged as a leading AI system, widely deployed across China's tertiary hospitals since January 2025. Initially implemented in Shanghai's major medical institutions, it has since expanded nationwide, enhancing diagnostic accuracy, streamlining workflows, and improving patient management. AI-powered pathology, imaging analysis, and clinical decision support systems have demonstrated significant potential in optimizing medical processes and reducing the cognitive burden on healthcare professionals. However, the widespread adoption of AI in healthcare raises critical regulatory and ethical challenges, particularly regarding accountability in AI-assisted diagnosis and the risk of automation bias. The absence of a well-defined liability framework underscores the need for policies that ensure AI functions as an assistive tool rather than an autonomous decision-maker. With continued technological advancements, AI is expected to integrate multimodal data sources, such as genomics and radiomics, paving the way for precision medicine and personalized treatment strategies. The future of AI in healthcare depends on the development of transparent regulatory structures, industry collaboration, and adaptive governance frameworks that balance innovation with responsibility, ensuring equitable and effective AI-driven medical services.
Authors: Sijia Yao, Pengcheng Huang, Zhenghao Liu, Yu Gu, Yukun Yan, Shi Yu, Ge Yu
Abstract: Query expansion plays a crucial role in information retrieval, which aims to bridge the semantic gap between queries and documents to improve matching performance. This paper introduces LLM-QE, a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate document-based query expansions, thereby enhancing dense retrieval models. Unlike traditional methods, LLM-QE designs both rank-based and answer-based rewards and uses these reward models to optimize LLMs to align with the ranking preferences of both retrievers and LLMs, thus mitigating the hallucination of LLMs during query expansion. Our experiments on the zero-shot dense retrieval model, Contriever, demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-QE, achieving an improvement of over 8%. Furthermore, by incorporating answer-based reward modeling, LLM-QE generates more relevant and precise information related to the documents, rather than simply producing redundant tokens to maximize rank-based rewards. Notably, LLM-QE also improves the training process of dense retrievers, achieving a more than 5% improvement after fine-tuning. All codes are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/LLM-QE.
Authors: Younghoon Na, Hyun Keun Ahn, Hyun-Kyung Lee, Yoongeol Lee, Seung Hun Oh, Hongkwon Kim, Jeong-Gun Lee
Abstract: Sleep profoundly affects our health, and sleep deficiency or disorders can cause physical and mental problems. Despite significant findings from previous studies, challenges persist in optimizing deep learning models, especially in multi-modal learning for high-accuracy sleep stage classification. Our research introduces MC2SleepNet (Multi-modal Cross-masking with Contrastive learning for Sleep stage classification Network). It aims to facilitate the effective collaboration between Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformer architectures for multi-modal training with the help of contrastive learning and cross-masking. Raw single channel EEG signals and corresponding spectrogram data provide differently characterized modalities for multi-modal learning. Our MC2SleepNet has achieved state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of both 84.6% on the SleepEDF-78 and 88.6% accuracy on the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS). These results demonstrate the effective generalization of our proposed network across both small and large datasets.
Authors: Wei Liu, Yancheng He, Hui Huang, Chengwei Hu, Jiaheng Liu, Shilong Li, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
Abstract: With the development of large language models, their ability to follow simple instructions has significantly improved. However, adhering to complex instructions remains a major challenge. Current approaches to generating complex instructions are often irrelevant to the current instruction requirements or suffer from limited scalability and diversity. Moreover, methods such as back-translation, while effective for simple instruction generation, fail to leverage the rich contents and structures in large web corpora. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic iterative refinement framework to generate complex instructions with constraints, which not only better reflects the requirements of real scenarios but also significantly enhances LLMs' ability to follow complex instructions. The AIR framework consists of two stages: (1)Generate an initial instruction from a document; (2)Iteratively refine instructions with LLM-as-judge guidance by comparing the model's output with the document to incorporate valuable constraints. Finally, we construct the AIR-10K dataset with 10K complex instructions and demonstrate that instructions generated with our approach significantly improve the model's ability to follow complex instructions, outperforming existing methods for instruction generation.
Authors: Haris Riaz, Ellen Riloff, Mihai Surdeanu
Abstract: We propose a simple, unsupervised method that injects pragmatic principles in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks such as Dense Passage Retrieval to enhance the utility of retrieved contexts. Our approach first identifies which sentences in a pool of documents retrieved by RAG are most relevant to the question at hand, cover all the topics addressed in the input question and no more, and then highlights these sentences within their context, before they are provided to the LLM, without truncating or altering the context in any other way. We show that this simple idea brings consistent improvements in experiments on three question answering tasks (ARC-Challenge, PubHealth and PopQA) using five different LLMs. It notably enhances relative accuracy by up to 19.7% on PubHealth and 10% on ARC-Challenge compared to a conventional RAG system.
Authors: Yashan Wang, Shangda Wu, Jianhuai Hu, Xingjian Du, Yueqi Peng, Yongxin Huang, Shuai Fan, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
Abstract: We introduce NotaGen, a symbolic music generation model aiming to explore the potential of producing high-quality classical sheet music. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), NotaGen adopts pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning paradigms (henceforth referred to as the LLM training paradigms). It is pre-trained on 1.6M pieces of music, and then fine-tuned on approximately 9K high-quality classical compositions conditioned on "period-composer-instrumentation" prompts. For reinforcement learning, we propose the CLaMP-DPO method, which further enhances generation quality and controllability without requiring human annotations or predefined rewards. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of CLaMP-DPO in symbolic music generation models with different architectures and encoding schemes. Furthermore, subjective A/B tests show that NotaGen outperforms baseline models against human compositions, greatly advancing musical aesthetics in symbolic music generation.
Authors: Yuxuan Zhang
Abstract: With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), fully fine-tuning (FT) these models has become increasingly impractical due to the high computational demands. Additionally, FT can lead to catastrophic forgetting. As an alternative, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has been proposed, which fine-tunes only a small subset of parameters, achieving similar performance to FT while significantly reducing resource requirements. However, since LoRA inherits FT's design, the issue of catastrophic forgetting remains. To address these challenges, we propose SECURA: Sigmoid-Enhanced CUR Decomposition LoRA, a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) variant that mitigates catastrophic forgetting while improving fine-tuning performance. Our method introduces a new normalization technique, SigNorm, to enhance parameter retention and overall performance. SECURA has been evaluated on a variety of tasks, including mathematical problem-solving (GSM8K), challenging question-answering (CNNDM), translation (NewsDE), and complex multiple-choice reasoning (LogiQA). Experimental results show that SECURA achieves an average fine-tuning improvement of 3.59% across four multiple-choice question (MCQ) tasks and a 2.51% improvement across five question-answering (QA) tasks on models such as Gemma2 2b, Qwen2 1.5b, Qwen 2 7b, Llama3 8b, and Llama3.1 8b, compared to DoRA. Moreover, SECURA demonstrates superior knowledge retention capabilities, maintaining more than 70% accuracy on basic LLM knowledge across 16 continual learning tests, outperforming Experience Replay (ER), Sequential Learning (SEQ), EWC, I-LoRA, and CUR-LoRA.
Authors: Milan Vojnovic, Se-Young Yun
Abstract: In this note, we examine the aggregation of preferences achieved by the Group Policy Optimisation (GRPO) algorithm, a reinforcement learning method used to train advanced artificial intelligence models such as DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeekMath. The GRPO algorithm trains a policy using a reward preference model, which is computed by sampling a set of outputs for a given context, observing the corresponding rewards, and applying shift-and-scale normalisation to these reward values. Additionally, it incorporates a penalty function to discourage deviations from a reference policy. We present a framework that enables us to characterise the stationary policies of the GRPO algorithm. This analysis reveals that the aggregation of preferences differs fundamentally from standard logarithmic pooling, which is implemented by other approaches such as RLHF. The precise form of preference aggregation arises from the way the reward preference model is defined and from the penalty function, which we show to essentially correspond to the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the aggregation policy and the reference policy. Interestingly, we demonstrate that for groups of size two, the reward preference model corresponds to pairwise comparison preferences, similar to those in other alignment methods based on pairwise comparison feedback. We provide explicit characterisations of the aggregate preference for binary questions, for groups of size two, and in the limit of large group size. This provides insights into the dependence of the aggregate preference on parameters such as the regularisation constant and the confidence margin of question answers. Finally, we discuss the aggregation of preferences obtained by modifying the GRPO algorithm to use direct KL divergence as the penalty or to use rewards without scale normalisation.
Authors: Jiayi Fu, Xuandong Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Heng Wang, Qi Han, Yanghua Xiao
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF is susceptible to reward hacking, where the agent exploits flaws in the reward function rather than learning the intended behavior, thus degrading alignment. While reward shaping helps stabilize RLHF and partially mitigate reward hacking, a systematic investigation into shaping techniques and their underlying principles remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive study of the prevalent reward shaping methods. Our analysis suggests three key design principles: (1) RL reward is ideally bounded, (2) RL benefits from rapid initial growth followed by gradual convergence, and (3) RL reward is best formulated as a function of centered reward. Guided by these insights, we propose Preference As Reward (PAR), a novel approach that leverages the latent preferences embedded within the reward model itself as the signal for reinforcement learning. We evaluated PAR on two base models, Gemma2-2B and Llama3-8B, using two datasets, Ultrafeedback-Binarized and HH-RLHF. Experimental results demonstrate PAR's superior performance over other reward shaping methods. On the AlpacaEval 2.0 benchmark, PAR achieves a win rate at least 5 percentage points higher than competing approaches. Furthermore, PAR exhibits remarkable data efficiency, requiring only a single reference reward for optimal performance, and maintains robustness against reward hacking even after two full epochs of training. Code is available at https://github.com/PorUna-byte/PAR.
Authors: Gyeongje Cho, Yeonkyoung So, Jaejin Lee
Abstract: Multiple-choice benchmarks, consisting of various prompts and choices, are among the most widely used methods to assess a language model's natural language understanding capability. Given a specific prompt, we typically compute $P(Choice|Prompt)$ to evaluate how likely a language model is to generate the correct choice compared to incorrect ones. However, we observe that performance measured using this approach reflects not only the model's comprehension of the prompt but also its inherent biases for certain choices regardless of the prompt. This issue makes it challenging to accurately measure a model's natural language understanding, as models may select the answer without fully understanding the prompt. To address this limitation, we propose a novel metric called ANPMI, which normalizes Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) by $-\log P(Choice)$. ANPMI provides a more accurate assessment of the model's natural language understanding by ensuring that it is challenging to answer a question without properly understanding the prompt.
Authors: Ruifeng Tan, Weixiang Hong, Jiayue Tang, Xibin Lu, Ruijun Ma, Xiang Zheng, Jia Li, Jiaqiang Huang, Tong-Yi Zhang
Abstract: Battery Life Prediction (BLP), which relies on time series data produced by battery degradation tests, is crucial for battery utilization, optimization, and production. Despite impressive advancements, this research area faces three key challenges. Firstly, the limited size of existing datasets impedes insights into modern battery life data. Secondly, most datasets are restricted to small-capacity lithium-ion batteries tested under a narrow range of diversity in labs, raising concerns about the generalizability of findings. Thirdly, inconsistent and limited benchmarks across studies obscure the effectiveness of baselines and leave it unclear if models popular in other time series fields are effective for BLP. To address these challenges, we propose BatteryLife, a comprehensive dataset and benchmark for BLP. BatteryLife integrates 16 datasets, offering a 2.4 times sample size compared to the previous largest dataset, and provides the most diverse battery life resource with batteries from 8 formats, 80 chemical systems, 12 operating temperatures, and 646 charge/discharge protocols, including both laboratory and industrial tests. Notably, BatteryLife is the first to release battery life datasets of zinc-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, and industry-tested large-capacity lithium-ion batteries. With the comprehensive dataset, we revisit the effectiveness of baselines popular in this and other time series fields. Furthermore, we propose CyclePatch, a plug-in technique that can be employed in a series of neural networks. Extensive benchmarking of 18 methods reveals that models popular in other time series fields can be unsuitable for BLP, and CyclePatch consistently improves model performance establishing state-of-the-art benchmarks. Moreover, BatteryLife evaluates model performance across aging conditions and domains. BatteryLife is available at https://github.com/Ruifeng-Tan/BatteryLife.
Authors: Hongyi Cal, Jie Li, Wenzhen Dong
Abstract: The effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning for Large Language Models is fundamentally constrained by the quality and efficiency of training datasets. This work introduces Low-Confidence Gold (LCG), a novel filtering framework that employs centroid-based clustering and confidence-guided selection for identifying valuable instruction pairs. Through a semi-supervised approach using a lightweight classifier trained on representative samples, LCG curates high-quality subsets while preserving data diversity. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that models fine-tuned on LCG-filtered subsets of 6K samples achieve superior performance compared to existing methods, with substantial improvements on MT-bench and consistent gains across comprehensive evaluation metrics. The framework's efficacy while maintaining model performance establishes a promising direction for efficient instruction tuning.
Authors: Zhiqiang Wang, Haoyu Wang, Lu Hao
Abstract: Webshell is a type of backdoor, and web applications are widely exposed to webshell injection attacks. Therefore, it is important to study webshell detection techniques. In this study, we propose a webshell detection method. We first convert PHP source code to opcodes and then extract Opcode Double-Tuples (ODTs). Next, we combine CodeBert and FastText models for feature representation and classification. To address the challenge that deep learning methods have difficulty detecting long webshell files, we introduce a sliding window attention mechanism. This approach effectively captures malicious behavior within long files. Experimental results show that our method reaches high accuracy in webshell detection, solving the problem of traditional methods that struggle to address new webshell variants and anti-detection techniques.